Loding Complete
Explore Labor Supply and Demand
We show that leadership skill with artificially intelligent (AI) agents predicts leadership skill with human groups. In a large pre-registered lab experiment, human leaders worked with AI agents to solve problems. Their performance on this AI leadership test was strongly correlated (=0.81) with...
We measure the level and growth of education segregation in American workplaces from 2000 to 2020. American workplaces show an educational segregation, measured by the degree to which the establishment has mostly workers of similar education levels, that is comparable to racial residential...
This paper studies psychological biases in take-up of annuities, using an incentivized experiment with a probability-based sample (N = 3,038). Choosing an annuity was payoff-maximizing in the experiment at all prices, but take-up was incomplete and price elastic. Reformulating decisions as insurance...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The composition and quality of the child care workforce may be uniquely sensitive to changes in the complementarities between home production and market work. This paper examines whether the expansion of oral contraceptives and abortion access throughout the 1960's and 1970's influenced the...
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 leverage recent advances in NLP to construct measures of workers' task exposure to AI and machine learning technologies over the 2010 to 2023 period that vary across firms and time. Using a theoretical framework that allows for a labor-saving technology to affect worker productivity both directly...
Budget set kinks are much studied in economics, including in the context of bunching estimators that assume individuals react to the true marginal tax rate. We document that individuals disproportionately left-bunch below kinks in the context of the Social Security Earnings Test where incentives...
We investigate the impact of digital technology on employment patterns in Korea, where firms have rapidly adopted digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and the internet of things (IoT). By exploiting regional variations in technology exposure, we find significant...
Higher technical-education institutions play an important role in training industrial scientists and engineers and generating new technologies. How well they perform this role, however, depends on their ability to recruit and retain talented faculty who have alternative options in industry; moreover...
This paper examines how the composition of firm exposure and competition among imperfectly substitutable workers mediate the earnings, welfare, and unemployment incidence of changes in the international trade environment. We merge LEHD job match records with firm-level import and export records from...
Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans tie student loan repayment to income and forgive unpaid debt after certain years of repayment. We investigate how these features affect ones career choices through a survey where the same student is asked to select job profiles under various repayment plans....
We examine the link between the diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled technologies and changes in the female employment share in 16 European countries over the period 2011-2019. Using data for occupations at the 3-digit level, we find that on average female employment shares increased in...
Student loan forgiveness has been proposed as a means to alleviate soaring student loan burdens. This paper uses administrative credit bureau data to study the distributional, consumption, borrowing, and employment effects of the largest event of student loan forgiveness in history. Beginning in...
A large theoretical literature on job search predicts that a higher minimum wage will increase the number of job seekers for affected jobs, which can lead to more job creation and higher employment. This paper uses novel data on job search in all U.S. states to examine the effect of minimum wage...
We analyze the differential effects of minimum wage increases on individuals with disabilities using data from the American Community Survey and leveraging state-level minimum wage variation during the 2010s. We find that large minimum wage increases significantly reduce employment and labor force...
This paper studies how family and firm investments interact to explain gender gaps in career achievement. Using Danish administrative data, we first document novel evidence of this interaction through a spousal effect on firm-side career investments. This effect is accounted for by family labor...
This chapter analyzes the distinct adjustment paths of U.S. labor markets (places) and U.S. workers (people) to increased Chinese import competition during the 2000s. Using comprehensive register data for 20002019, we document that employment levels more than fully rebound in trade-exposed places...
We leverage decades of administrative data and quasi-experimental variation in the introduction of universal long-term care (LTC) insurance in Germany in 1995 to examine whether health insurance expansions can stimulate local economies. We find that the LTC insurance rollout led not only to sizeable...
Economists disagree about the factors driving the substantial increase in residual wage inequality in the US over the past few decades. To identify changes in the returns to unobserved skills, we make a novel assumption about the dynamics of skills rather than about the stability of skill...
One explanation of the gender wage gap is taste discrimination, as in Becker (1957). We test for taste discrimination by constructing a novel measure of misogyny using Google Trends data on searches that include derogatory terms for women. We findsurprisingly, in our viewthat misogyny is an...
February 1, 2025 - Article
In recent decades, cities, states, and the federal government have expanded funding for universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) programs. These programs are large and free. The policy logic underlying UPK expansion is that many parents may lack access to or underinvest in pre-kindergarten childcare and...
January 31, 2025 - Chapter
Tribal lands in the US 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 only started out in the early 1990s...
We estimate the value employees place on remote work using revealed preferences in a high-stakes, real-world context, focusing on U.S. tech workers. On average, employees are willing to accept a 25% pay cut for partly or fully remote roles. Our estimates are three to five times that of previous...
We document that female breadwinners do more home production than their male partners, driven by housework like cooking and cleaning. By comparing to same sex couples, we highlight that specialization within heterosexual households does not appear to be gender neutral even after accounting for...
We study the impact of Federal alcohol Prohibition in 1919 on workers in the alcohol industry and their families using newly linked census records that allow us to follow spouses, sons and daughters. Immediately after Prohibition, men previously working in alcohol-related industries were less likely...
Platform intermediation of goods and services has considerably transformed the U.S. economy. We use administrative data on U.S. tax returns to study the role of the gig economy on entrepreneurship. We find that gig workers are more likely to become entrepreneurs, particularly those who are lower...
How managers frame the adoption of organizational practices may impact the returns to such practices, but managerial justification is often correlated with the use of particular practices or other dimensions of managerial quality. Using a randomized control trial, we study how the causal impacts of...
Early childhood in developing countries faces a greater prevalence of risk factors and limited resources, underscoring the need for effective, scalable support models. We develop and experimentally evaluate a multi-component approach to enhance family well-being over-the-phone. The program combines...
This paper explores past episodes of technological disruption in the US labor market, with the goal of learning lessons about the likely future impact of artificial intelligence (AI). We measure changes in the structure of the US labor market going back over a century. We find, perhaps surprisingly,...
Author(s) - Amanda Dahlstrand, Dávid László, Helena Schweiger, Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat & Raffaella Sadun
Firms are key to economic development, and CEOs are key to firm productivity. Are firms in countries at varying stages of development led by the right CEOs, and if not, why? We develop a parsimonious measure of CEO time use that allows us to differentiate CEOs into leaders and managers in a survey...
Remote work policies remain controversial because of the perceived opportunity for increased shirking outside of the traditional office; a problem that is potentially exacerbated if employees work in a revenue-sharing team environment. Using a controlled experiment, where individuals are randomized...
We use a survey of nearly 360,000 workers conducted from May 2020 through December 2023 to characterize shifts in remote work across time, industry, occupation, and geography, and examine the evolving relationship between remote work and employee engagement. We find remarkable stability in the...
Author(s) - Francine D. Blau
This article examines the trends in womens economic outcomes in the United States focusing primarily on labor force participation, occupational attainment, and the gender wage gap. The author first highlights considerable progress on all dimensions prior to the 1990s followed by a slowing or...
Author(s) - Sabrin A. Beg, Anne E. Fitzpatrick, Jason T. Kerwin, Adrienne Lucas & Khandker Wahedur Rahman
Public-sector organizations face a tradeoff: allowing workers discretion at the point of service to adapt to local needs, versus rigid harmonization to ensure uniform service delivery. We examine this tradeoff in the context of secondary schools in Odisha, India, where the centrally set curriculum...
New firms do not yet have employees who can aid recruiting by referrals, but entrepreneurs can recruit workers they know to their startupsin effect making their own referrals. We consider new firms in Brazils formal sector founded between 2002 and 2014, for which at least one founding owner can be...
In the past two years, 25 states have enacted executive orders and legislation to reduce unnecessary degree requirements for public sector jobs, signaling a shift toward skill-based hiring. This paper examines the impact of these policy commitments on public perceptions, media coverage, and job...
We investigate the influence of the growing trend of work-from-home (WFH) on new business formation, with a particular focus on the period surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. At baseline, local new business entry is positively associated with the proportion of occupations amenable to telework in the...
A recent econometric literature shows two distinct paths for identification with shift-share instruments, leveraging either many exogenous shifts or exogenous shares. We present the core logic of both paths and practical takeaways via simple checklists. A variety of empirical settings illustrate key...
December 1, 2024 - Article
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has recently emerged as a potentially transformative workplace technology. The ultimate impact of generative AI on the economy will depend on how many workers adopt the technology, how intensively they use it, and for which tasks. In The Rapid Adoption of...
Modern tech platforms provide workers real-time control over when they work, and increasingly, flexible pay: the option to be paid immediately after work. We investigate the labor supply effects of pay flexibility and the implications of present-biased preferences among gig-economy workers. Using...
Author(s) - Charles Yuji Horioka
This paper explores the determinants of the level of, and trends over time in, Japans household saving rate, with emphasis on the impact of the age structure of the population, and makes projections about future trends therein. The paper finds that Japans household saving rate has not always been...
This chapter traces the evolution of the study of gender in the labor market, focusing on how academic thinking on this topic has evolved alongside real world developments in gender inequality from the 1980s to the present. We present a simple model of female labor supply to illustrate how various...
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