The Agricultural Productivity Gap (APG) - the ratio of the average labor productivity in non-agriculture to that in agriculture - tends to be very large in developing countries and potentially represents misallocation of resources. This paper makes three contributions to the literature on APG....

We investigate links between routine-biased technical change, the structure of occupational employment, and cross-country income differences. To implement this, we combine several data sources including national labour force surveys and Penn World Tables. We first document that in our novel...

Making use of an international survey that directly assess the cognitive skills of the adult population, I document systematic differences in the effect of skills on job mobility across the 37 countries in the sample. While economic growth is associated with relatively higher job mobility among...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that skill-biased technological change that shifts labor demand towards non-routine jobs has accelerated during the Great Recession. We analyze the interaction between the gradual process of transition towards a skill intensive technology and business cycles in...

In recent decades, the U.S. labor market has become more unequal and polarized: wage differences have widened and middle-income jobs have been replaced by low- and high-income jobs. The rise in inequality and polarization have been more pronounced in large cities. I argue that this can be...

Outsourcing is an efficient way to reduce a company's costs and is often necessary to remain competitive. However, the practice has had its critics. This paper summarizes the outsourcing debate that has been going on in the United States and identifies and discusses some ethical issues that...

We identify a key role of factor supply, driven by demographic changes, in shaping several empirical regularities that are a focus of active research in macro and labor economics. In particular, the large movements of the return to experience over the last four decades are almost perfectly...

The Global Repository of Income Dynamics (GRID) is a new open-access, cross- country database that contains a wide range of micro statistics on income inequality, dynamics, and mobility. It has four key characteristics: it is built on micro panel data drawn from administrative records; it fully...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...