This paper documents how plant-level wages, occupational mix, workforce education, and productivity vary with the adoption and use of new factory automation technologies, such as programmable controllers, computer-automated design, and numerically controlled machines. The authors'...

Over the past thirty years, U.S. manufacturing plants invested heavily in automation machinery. This paper shows these investments substituted for the least-skilled workers and complemented middle-skilled workers at equipment and fabricated metal plants. Specifically, it exploits the fact that...

This paper examines how a large conditional grants program influenced school desegregation in the American South. Exploiting newly collected archival data and quasi-experimental variation in potential per-pupil federal grants, we show that school districts with more at risk in 1966 were more...