This paper tests for downward nominal wage rigidity by examining transitory shifts in labor demand, generated by rainfall shocks, in 600 Indian districts from 1956-2009. Nominal wages rise in response to positive shocks but do not fall during droughts. In addition, transitory positive shocks...

Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a unified explanation for several seemingly unrelated facts about employment growth in macro and micro data. In particular, they generate countercyclical movement in both aggregate conditional...

Low-skill workers are comparatively immobile: when labor demand slumps in a city, low-skill workers are disproportionately likely to remain to face declining wages and employment. This paper estimates the extent to which (falling) housing prices and (rising) social transfers can account for this...

This paper studies how gradualism affects the welfare gains from trade, technology, and reforms. When people face adjustment frictions, gradual shocks create less adverse distributional effects in the short run. We show that there are welfare gains from inducing a more gradual transition via...

Since the start of the pandemic the U.S. labor market has been characterized as being plagued by missing jobs, i.e. payroll employment has fallen more than five million jobs short of its pre-pandemic trend, and missing workers, i.e. the participation rate has declined by 1.2 percentage points: A...

This paper describes the adoption of automation technologies by US firms across all economic sectors by leveraging a new module introduced in the 2019 Annual Business Survey, conducted by the US Census Bureau in partnership with the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES)....

This study examines the impact of unions on wages and employment using data from Uruguay in a period where unions were banned (1973-1984), then legalized with tripartite bargaining (1984-1991) followed by industry-wide or firm-specific bargaining (1992-1997). The relationship between wages and...

When wage contracts are relatively short-lived, rent sharing may reduce the incentives for investment since some of the returns to sunk capital are captured by workers. In this paper we use a matched worker-firm data set from the Veneto region of Italy that combines Social Security earnings...

This paper studies the dynamics of labor demand at the plant and aggregate levels. The correlation of hours and employment growth is negative at the plant level and positive in aggregate time series. Further, hours and employment growth are about equally volatile at the plant level while hours...

The effects of exchange rate fluctuations across the population is an important issue for increasingly globalized economies. Previous studies using industry aggregate data have found differences across industries in the labor market implications of exchange rates, reporting that industry wages...