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
Income inequality in the Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden — is substantially lower than in the United States or the United Kingdom...
In Places versus People: The Ins and Outs of Labor Market Adjustment to Globalization (NBER Working Paper 33424), David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H....
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...
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November 14, 2025 - Conference
July 22-23, 2025 - ConferenceProgram
July 21-23, 2025 - ConferenceProgram
We present evidence on how generative AI changes the work patterns of knowledge workers using data from a 6-month-long, cross-industry, randomized field experiment. Half of the 7,137 workers in the study received access to a generative AI tool integrated into the applications they already used for...
Why are wages in cities like New York or Paris higher than in others? This paper uses firm mobility to separate the role of location effects (e.g., local geography, infrastructure, and agglomeration) from the spatial sorting of workers and firms. Using French administrative records and U.S....
In this paper, we examine the role of coethnic advisor-student matching in U.S. Ph.D. programs in attracting, training and guiding immigrant talent into top jobs in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Using comprehensive administrative data on 1,769 AI Ph.D. graduates from top U.S. programs, combined with...
Curricula impart knowledge, instill values, and shape collective memory. Despite growing public funding for religious schools through U.S. school choice programs, little is known about what they teach. We examine textbooks from public schools, religious private schools, and home schools, applying...
Using a novel firm-level remote work measure created from big data on Internet activity, we show that firms with higher remote work during the pandemic are more likely to see their employees becoming entrepreneurs. This effect holds both unconditionally and relative to other types of job turnovers....
Gender imbalance in time spent on child rearing causes gender inequalities in labor market outcomes, human capital accumulation, and economic mobility. We conduct a large-scale field experiment with a near-universe of US schools to investigate a potential source of inequality: external demands for...
Nearly a third of American children experience parental divorce before adulthood. To understand its consequences, we use linked tax and Census records for over 5 million children to examine how divorce affects family arrangements and children's long-term outcomes. Following divorce, parents move...
While Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) is often proposed as an economic stimulus, its market effects remain uncertain. We analyze UPK programs implemented across nine states and cities from 1995 to 2020, leveraging their staggered adoption for identification. UPK increased Pre-K enrollment and led...
We study the granular wage and employment effects of a German place-based policy using a research design that leverages EU-wide rules governing program parameters at the regional level. The program subsidizes investments to create jobs with a subsidy rate that varies across labor market regions. We...
We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants and improve the performance of the plants they acquire. To explain these findings we build a model with...
We examine the labor market effects of AI chatbots using two large-scale adoption surveys (late 2023 and 2024) covering 11 exposed occupations (25,000 workers, 7,000 workplaces), linked to matched employer-employee data in Denmark. AI chatbots are now widespreadmost employers encourage their use,...
State laws that mandate in-grade retention for struggling readers are widespread in the U.S., covering 34% of public-school third graders in 2023-24. This study investigates the impacts of Michigans third-grade reading law on subsequent test scores and school progress outcomes for the 2020-21 and...
We examine the responsiveness of labor participation, unemployment and labor migration to exogenous variations in labor demand. Our empirical approach considers four instruments for regional labor demand commonly used in the literature. Empirically, we find that labor migration is a significant...
Author(s) - Nick Huntington-Klein, Claus C. Portner, Ian McCarthy & The Many Economists Collaborative on Researcher Variation
We use a rigorous three-stage many-analysts design to assess how different researcher decisionsspecifically data cleaning, research design, and the interpretation of a policy questionaffect the variation in estimated treatment effects. A total of 146 research teams each completed the same causal...
Child maltreatment is a major public health concern in the United States. Maltreatment is associated with a range of poor health, developmental, and economic outcomes for child victims. In this study, we examine the impact of recent state paid sick leave mandates on child maltreatment reports over...
This paper studies the use of mobile crisis response teamsa non-uniformed pair consisting of a mental health worker and a medicas a component of emergency response to 911 calls. We provide the first evaluation of the longest-running program in the United States, Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the...
Author(s) - Daniel S. Hamermesh
This study examines publications in three leading general economics journals from the 1960s through the 2020s, considering levels and trends in the demographics of authors, methodologies of the studies, and patterns of co-authorship. The average age of authors has increased nearly steadily; there...
The gender wage gap rises with experience. To what extent do firm policies mediate this rise? We use administrative data from Italy to identify workers' first jobs and compute wage growth over the next 5 years. We then decompose the contribution of first employers to the rise in the gender wage gap,...
We study the determinants of poor mental health among students at an elite private institution. Survey measures of well-being have declined significantly over the last decade for both high school students and those of college age. This is an international phenomenon that appears to have started in...
Tribal lands in the U.S. have historically experienced some of the worst economic conditions in the nation. We review some existing research on the effect of American Indian tribal casinos on various measures of local economic development. This is an industry that began in the early 1990s and...
Many developed countries have enacted reforms to reduce enrollment in disability benefits (DI). We evaluate the effects of a DI crackdown in Australia on the most comprehensive set of outcomes available to date, including earnings, government benefits, family income, and health care utilization....
We use Canadian matched employer-employee data to assess the sources of the union pay premium. After controlling for worker heterogeneity using the Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) (AKM) two-way fixed effects approach, we find that unionized firms pay about 15 log points more than non-unionized...
There is a consensus that there is an earnings premium for licensed workers relative to unlicensed workers. However, little is known about how occupational licensing affects earnings inequality. In this paper, we study dynamic, heterogeneous earnings effects of occupational licensing and draw...
The growth of longevity in the U.S. and other countries has increased interest in raising the age of eligibility for public retirement benefits. The consequences of this policy depend on the health of the older adult population overall and by socioeconomic group. In this paper, we estimate how...
Project
Based on the knowledge gaps in the literature and in the public debate, our project has four main research objectives: 1. provide broad descriptive and causal evidence on how temp agency work impact workers pay and employment trajectories as well as firms use of temp agency work, using a unique data...
May 1, 2025 - Article
Growing up in racially and economically segregated neighborhoods can have long-lasting effects. In 1966, Black families in Chicago sued the public housing authority over housing policies that segregated Black families. In response, the Chicago Housing Authority created a voucher program that would...
May 1, 2025 - Article
Income inequality in the Nordic countries Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden is substantially lower than in the United States or the United Kingdom despite similar levels of per capita income. The Gini coefficient for disposable income in Nordic countries averages 0.27, compared to 0.39 in the...
May 1, 2025 - Article
In Places versus People: The Ins and Outs of Labor Market Adjustment to Globalization (NBER Working Paper 33424), David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Maggie R. Jones, and Bradley Setzler examine how local labor markets and the workers in these markets adjusted to increased Chinese import...
Empirical research in economics often examines the behavior of agents located in a geographic space. In such cases, statistical inference is complicated by the interdependence of economic outcomes across locations. A common approach to account for this dependence is to cluster standard errors based...
During the first half of the twentieth century, many US states enacted laws restricting women's labor market opportunities, including maximum hours restrictions, minimum wage laws, and night-shift bans. The era of so-called protective labor laws came to an end in the 1960s as a result of civil...
How does improving access to the supply of energy affect regional specialization in manufacturing? We evaluate the long-run employment impacts of pipelines constructed by the U.S. government during World War II to transport oil and gas from the oil fields of the Southwest to wartime industrial...
We argue that college students field-of-study choices significantly influence how economies respond to labor market disruptions. To do so, we develop and estimate a framework featuring forward-looking students who choose a field of study when entering college, and subsequently make decisions over...
April 28, 2025 - 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...
The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented levels of federal transfers to state and local governments. Did this funding impact population health? To answer this question, we leverage the fact that U.S. states that enjoy excess representation in Congress received substantially more fiscal assistance...
This paper revisits the link between education-based marriage market sorting and income inequality. Leveraging Danish administrative data, we develop a novel categorization of ambition types that is based on starting wages and wage growth trajectories associated with detailed educational programs....
We study whether gender differences in university major choices result from anticipated labor market discrimination. First, we document two novel facts using administrative transcript records from a large Midwestern university: women are less likely to study science, technology, engineering, and...
We examine the impact of encouragement emails sent to high-performing students in a principles of microeconomics course at a large state university, aimed at motivating them to take additional economics courses and consider an economics major or minor. Using a regression discontinuity design, we...
Author(s) - Brayan S. Diaz, Andrea Neyra Nazarrett, Julian Ramirez, Raffaella Sadun & Jorge A. Tamayo
Training investments are essential for improving worker and firm productivity, yet their implementation is often hindered by low participation rates and insufficient worker engagement. This study uses data from three firmsa car manufacturer, a quick-service restaurant chain, and a retail companyto...
We examine the effect of a representative pension reform on the retention and productivity of workers. The reform cut pension annuities and early retirement benefits for public school teachers, projected to save eight percent of pension revenues. We leverage administrative records and a...
How good is AI at persuading humans to perform costly actions? We study calls made to get delinquent consumer borrowers to repay. Regression discontinuity and a randomized experiment reveal that AI is substantially less effective than human callers. Replacing AI with humans six days into delinquency...
We conduct a long-run evaluation of one of the oldest professional mentoring programs for underrepresented groups in economics, the American Economic Association Mentoring Program (AEAMP). The AEAMP was established to address the underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minority groups by mentoring...
We introduce the concept of racial capital, defined as the collective material and non- material assets of the racial groups to which a child is exposed while growing up, and examine its potential to explain racial disparities in life outcomes that persist even after accounting for a broad range of...
Author(s) - Robert Collinson, Deniz Dutz, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas S. Mader, Daniel Tannenbaum & Winnie van Dijk
Eviction may be an important channel for the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and concerns about its effects on children are often raised as a rationale for tenant protection policies. We study how eviction impacts children's home environment, school engagement, educational achievement,...
Income inequality is important, but attempts to measure it arrive at strikingly different conclusions. Why? We use recent disputes over measuring United States income inequality to return to first principles about both the income concept and inequality measurement. We emphasize two broad points....
We propose a spatial equilibrium model with heterogeneous households holding general non-homothetic preferences over tradable goods and housing. In equilibrium, desirable and productive locations command high housing prices. So long as housing is a necessity, these locations are disproportionately...
Author(s) - Alexandre Mas
This chapter reviews the analysis of non-wage amenities in the workplace. The competitive model is the point of departure, but the emphasis is on models of imperfect competition that have greater empirical relevance. In addition to the traditional hedonic model for estimating preferences over job...
Landmark results from the Women's Health Initiative trial showed that random assignment to menopausal hormone therapy (MHT) elevated risks of breast cancer and other adverse events. Recent analyses argue that MHT risks are small. These analyses report intention-to-treat (ITT) effects, ignoring the...
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