Labor income shares have been falling in many advanced and emerging economies within the last few decades, partly as a result of a combination of impacts from technology and increased global integration. This in turn is associated with the relatively slow growth of wages, especially for...

Labor income shares have been falling in many advanced and emerging economies within the last few decades, partly as a result of a combination of impacts from technology and increased global integration. This in turn is associated with the relatively slow growth of wages, especially for...

Medical costs are among the most significant factors in determining long run fiscal requirements for the federal budget of the United States, and for the individual household budgets of retirees. Rapid growth and high individual variance make projections of future expenditures in the 20 to 50...

Sharing risks is one of the essential economic roles of families. The importance of this role increases in the amount of uncertainty that households face in the labor market and in the degree of incompleteness of financial markets. We develop a theory of joint household search in frictional...

While much attention has been focused on the financial woes of the US economy in the wake of the Great Recession, this chapter focuses on an important real sector imbalance: the failure of real wages to keep pace with productivity growth over the past three decades. This imbalance is shown to...

Do robots raise or lower economic well-being? On the one hand, they raise output and bring more goods and services into reach. On the other hand, they eliminate jobs, shift investments away from machines that complement labor, lower wages, and immiserize workers who cannot compete. The net...

In recent years, economists and other social scientists have devoted extensive research efforts to understanding the widening wage gap between high-skill and low-skill workers. This paper focuses on a slightly different question: how has globalization affected the relative share of income going...

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, demographic changes alone can account for the large movements of the return to experience over the...

In a simple one-sector economy operating at full capacity, workers and firms bargain a la Nash (1950) over wages and productivity gains taking into account the trade-offs faced by firms in choosing factor-augmenting technolo- gies. The aggregate environment that arises from self-interested...

We survey the rich literature studying the behaviour of labor shares in recent decades. To explain their dynamics – the main feature being the decline of European and American shares starting in the 1980s – such literature considers models that use either neoclassical or Leontief-type...