Codirectors
David Autor is the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the determinants of inequality, with particular emphasis on the impact of technology, automation, and trade on labor market outcomes. He has been an NBER affiliate since 1999.
Alexandre Mas is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the role of fairness considerations, social forces, credit disruptions, and other factors in affecting labor market outcomes. He has been an NBER affiliate since 2006.
Featured Program Content
A new study of German and Swedish data finds that men’s earnings increase following a couple’s move to a new commuting zone, while women’s earnings stay the...
The recent rise of the gig economy has raised many new questions about labor markets and the impact of new business models on workers. In Driving the Gig...
As the workforce in Europe and the US has grown older, the average wages of older workers have risen more rapidly than those of their younger colleagues. This...
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November 14, 2025 - Conference
July 22-23, 2025 - Conference
July 21-23, 2025 - Conference
April 4, 2025 - ConferenceProgram
Book - Conference Volume
This volume refines and extends the economic history literature on economic inequality in the United States. Economic inequality manifests itself on various dimensions, including access to resources and to economic security, as well as access to education and opportunities for migration, marriage...
April 1, 2025 - Article
Proximity to a community college impacts college enrollment and degree completion, particularly for minority and low-income students. Consequently, disparities in geographic access to higher education contribute to educational attainment gaps across demographic groups. In Distance to Degrees: How...
April 1, 2025 - Article
Children with disabilities are three and a half times more likely to suffer from maltreatment. The federal Early Intervention (EI) program, which serves 3.7 percent of children under three, supports families in meeting the developmental needs of children who have, or are at risk for, developmental...
April 1, 2025 - Article
Author(s) - Claudia Goldin
When nations experience rapid economic modernization, traditional family values can clash with new social realities and result in sharply declining birth rates. This insight helps to explain why some developed countries have much lower current fertility rates than others, despite having had higher...
April 1, 2025 - Article
Girls are more likely to go to college than boys. One explanation for this pattern is that boys have weaker noncognitive skills, such as self-discipline, than girls. In Can Gifted Education Help Higher-Ability Boys from Disadvantaged Backgrounds? (NBER Working Paper 33282), David Card, Eric Chyn,...
April 1, 2025 - Article
The role of standardized tests in college admissions has been a subject of intense discussion and evolving policies for some time. While proponents argue that test scores are vital indicators of academic preparedness, others believe they perpetuate inequality because of differential access to test...
Author(s) - Joshua Angrist, Peter Hull, Russell Legate-Yang, Parag A. Pathak & Christopher R. Walters
School districts increasingly gauge school quality with surveys that ask about school climate and student engagement. We use data from New York City's middle and high schools to compare the long-run predictive validity of surveys with that of conventional test score value-added models (VAMs). Our...
Personalizing policies can theoretically increase their effectiveness. However, personalization is difficult when individual types are unobservable and the preferences of policymakers and individuals are not aligned, which could cause individuals to misreport their type. Mechanism design offers a...
When estimating the effects of treatments defined by complex formulas, researchers often use simple functions of exogenous shocks as instruments. A leading example is simulated instruments for public policy eligibility, which capture variation in state-level policy generosity. We show how more...
This chapter examines the role of spatial sorting in shaping economic inequality in the United States. We first document the evolution of firm and worker sorting by skill level between 1980 and 2017. We highlight a shift since 2000, where both high-education workers and firms increasingly sort away...
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, the amount of telework sharply increased, allowing people to work while limiting their exposure to others. At that time, there were no regular monthly economic indicators measuring the prevalence of telework. Thus, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics...
We develop a dynamic macroeconomic framework with worker heterogeneity, putty-clay adjustment frictions, and firm monopsony power to study the distributional impact of labor market policies over time. Our framework reconciles the well-known tension between low short-run and high long-run...
We examine class disparities and discrimination in police searches and stops using data on traffic stops conducted by Texas Highway Patrol. Low-income motorists are more likely to be searched for contraband, less likely to be found with contraband when searched, and more likely to be stopped for...
Revolving door laws restrict public officials from representing private interests before government after leaving office. While these laws mitigate potential conflicts of interest, they also may affect the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the financial benefits of holding office....
We examine changes in the spatial distribution of good jobs across US commuting zones over 1980-2000 and 2000-2021. We define good jobs as those in industries in which full-time workers attain high wages, accounting for individual and regional characteristics. The share of good jobs in manufacturing...
In the World Bank Enterprise Survey, the share of entrepreneurs who are women first rises and then falls with national income, which reverses the well-known U-shaped relationship between female labor force participation and economic development. This paper presents a model of entrepreneurship in...
Author(s) - Muriel Niederle
This chapter is intended as an introduction to laboratory experiments, when to use, how to evaluate them, why they matter and what are the pitfalls when designing them. I hope that users as well as consumers will find Sections that broaden their views. I start with when an economist might want to...
March 25, 2025 - Article
Author(s) - Ashvin Gandhi, Ian Larkin, Brian McGarry, Katherine Wen, Huizi Yu, Sarah Berry, Vince Mor, Maggie Syme & Elizabeth White
During the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing home residents were particularly vulnerable due to their age and preexisting health conditions. In 2020, nearly 20 percent of COVID-19 cases in nursing homes resulted in death. The vast majority of nursing home residents were fully vaccinated within six months...
March 25, 2025 - Article
Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD) represent a growing global health crisis, with cases projected to reach 131.5 million by 2050. The economic burden is substantial: In 2020, ADRD cost the United States $305 billion, with forecasts suggesting a threefold increase over the next 35 years...
More than a century has passed since the abrupt exodus of 1.2 million Greek Orthodox from Anatolia and their resettlement in Greece, a transformative event for the countrys social and demographic landscape. Today, more than one in three Greeks reports a refugee background. While its historical...
This paper proposes novel natural language methods to measure worker rights from collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) for use in empirical economic analysis. Applying unsupervised text-as-data algorithms to a new collection of 30,000 CBAs from Canada in the period 1986-2015, we parse legal...
Leveraging county-level variation in exposure to industry-specific foreign-based robotics shocks, this study is the first to explore the relationship between U.S. robotics expansions and crime. Instrumental variables estimates show that a 10 percent increase in robotics exposure led to a 0.2 to 0.3...
The standard view of housing markets holds that the flexibility of local housing supplyshaped by factors like geography and regulationstrongly affects the response of house prices, house quantities and population to rising housing demand. However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth...
Author(s) - Mert Akan, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Thomas Bowen, Shelby R. Buckman, Steven J. Davis & Hyoseul Kim
We use matched employer-employee data to study where Americans live in relation to employer worksites. Mean distance from employee home to employer worksite rose from 15 miles in 2019 to 26 miles in 2023. Twelve percent of employees hired after March 2020 live at least fifty miles from their...
This chapter surveys new data sources employed in urban and regional economics in the past decade and the insights they have enabled. We first provide a primer on the data sources, including advantages, disadvantages and use cases. Historical data sources include linked census records as well as...
We analyze admissions and transcript records for students at multiple Ivy-Plus colleges to study the relationship between standardized (SAT/ACT) test scores, high school GPA, and first-year college grades. Standardized test scores predict academic outcomes with a normalized slope four times greater...
We document substantial racial disparities in consumer bankruptcy outcomes and investigate the role of racial bias in contributing to these disparities. Using data on the near universe of US bankruptcy cases and self-reported and manually-identified measures of race, we show that minority filers are...
We draw on a recombinant view of innovation, where being in a new location and/or multiple locations leads to exposure to novel combinations of ideas that increase the creativity of top scientists. Using a rich, unique dataset we helped assemble, we estimate the empirical relationship between being...
This paper investigates self-reported wedges between how much people work and how much they want to work, at their current wage. More than two-thirds of full-time workers in German survey data are overworkedactual hours exceed desired hours. We combine this evidence with a simple model of labor...
In this article, we show that working from home is much more prevalent in the Nordic countries than in the rest of Europe and we discuss potential causes and labor market consequences of this stylized fact. Likely contributing causes include a good technological infrastructure and comparatively...
The analysis of occupational licensing has concentrated largely on its labor market and consumer welfare effects. By contrast, relatively little is known about how occupational licensing laws originated or the key factors in their evolution. In this paper, we study the determinants of U.S. licensing...
Healthcare employment has grown more than twice as fast as the labor force since 1980, overtaking retail trade to become the largest industry by employment in 2009. We document key facts about the rise of healthcare jobs. Earnings for healthcare workers have risen nearly twice as fast as those in...
Using data from Academic Analytics 2009-2022 linked to publications and multiple approaches of identifying race, we examine gender and racial/ethnicity differentials in promotion of economists in economics and non-economics departments. Results are mixed. The share of Black economists remains at 3%....
Author(s) - Leah Boustan, Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen, Ran Abramitzky, Elisa Jácome, Alan Manning, Santiago Pérez, Analysia Watley, Adrian Adermon, Jaime Arellano-Bover, Olof Åslund, Marie Connolly, Nathan Deutscher, Anne C. Gielen, Yvonne Giesing, Yajna Govind, Martin Halla, Dominik Hangartner, Yuyan Jiang, Cecilia Karmel, Fanny Landaud, Lindsey Macmillan, Isabel Z. Martínez, Alberto Polo, Panu Poutvaara, Hillel Rapoport, Sara Roman, Kjell G. Salvanes, Shmuel San, Michael Siegenthaler, Louis Sirugue, Javier Soria Espín, Jan Stuhler, Giovanni L. Violante, Dinand Webbink, Andrea Weber, Jonathan Zhang, Angela Zheng & Tom Zohar
We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental income,...
We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life. Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their thirties...
Beginning in March 2020 and ultimately continuing to September 2023, most student loan borrowers had their required payments on federal student loans paused. For student loan borrowers with limited access to credit, the payment pause provided additional cash-on-hand that may have allowed them to...
This study investigates how occupational AI exposure impacts employment at the intensive margin, i.e., the length of workdays and the allocation of time between work and leisure. Drawing on individual-level time diary data from 20042023, we find that higher AI exposurewhether stemming from the...
We estimate causal effects of 121 graduate degrees on log earnings. The returns average 0.159 but vary widely across fields, with a standard deviation of 0.176. Experience profiles of the returns also vary and are particularly steep for medicine. Internal rates of return, which account for program...
Mexicos pioneering conditional cash transfer program Progresa, later renamed Prospera, operated over two decades in a shifting policy landscape. We exploit the program's sudden and unexpected rollback to estimate whether, two decades after rollout studies documented its initial impacts on schooling...
To what extent is a worker's relative rank within their workplace a determinant of health status, conditional on income? We provide the first US-based evidence on the relationship between relative workplace rank and health status for the near population of workers in one US state. Using a new...
Qualitative self-assessments of economic preferences have recently gained popularity, often supported by experimental validation, a method that links them to choices in incentivized elicitations. We illustrate theoretically that experimental validation may fail to produce reliable new measures....
We revisit the rationale for place-based policies using a canonical urban framework with agglomeration spillovers. We derive six main lessons. First, the spatial allocation is inefficient even when spillover elasticities are constant across regions. Second, under constant and positive spillover...
February 28, 2025 - ConferenceProgram
Headline estimates for the extent of work from home (WFH) differ widely across U.S. surveys. The differences shrink greatly when we harmonize with respect to the WFH concept, target population, and question design. As of 2025, our preferred estimates say that WFH accounts for a quarter of paid...
We model and analyze employer cartels that fix wages by committing to a wage ceiling. The setting is a frictional labor market with large employers that compete for workers via posted wages. Wage fixing reduces competition both inside and outside the cartel, leading to market-wide wage depression....
We examine the social construction of race during the United States' Reconstruction Era, a critical juncture between slavery and Jim Crow segregation. We show that people with the same detailed skin tone, recorded by the Freedman's Bank (1865-1874), were more likely racialized as White or Mulatto by...
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