Related papers: The Evolution of Unobserved Skill Returns in the U…
This paper explores different methods to estimate prices paid per efficiency unit of labor in panel data. We study the sensitivity of skill price estimates to different assumptions regarding workers' choice problem, identification…
This paper is part of the Global Income Dynamics Project cross-country comparison of earnings inequality, volatility, and mobility. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) infrastructure…
Recent research has documented a significant rise in the volatility (e.g., expected squared change) of individual incomes in the U.S. since the 1970s. Existing measures of this trend abstract from individual heterogeneity, effectively…
There is a large literature on earnings and income volatility in labor economics, household finance, and macroeconomics. One strand of that literature has studied whether individual earnings volatility has risen or fallen in the U.S. over…
Modern economies require increasingly diverse and specialized skills, many of which depend on the acquisition of other skills first. Here we analyse US survey data to reveal a nested structure within skill portfolios, where the direction of…
Substantial scholarship has estimated the susceptibility of jobs to automation, but little has examined how job contents evolve in the information age as new technologies substitute for tasks, shifting required skills rather than…
Although wage inequality has evolved in advanced countries over recent decades, it remains unknown the extent to which changes in wage inequality and their differences across countries are attributable to specific capital and labor…
We analyze and develop a quantitative model describing the evolution of personal income distribution, PID, for males and females in the U.S. between 1930 and 2014. The overall microeconomic model, which we introduced ten years ago,…
Technological change is responsible for major changes in the labor market. One of the offspring of technological change is the SBTC, which is for many economists the leading cause of the increasing wage inequality. However, despite that the…
We argue that the recent growth in income inequality is driven by disparate growth in investment income rather than by disparate growth in wages. Specifically, we present evidence that real wages are flat across a range of professions,…
The response threshold model explains the emergence of division of labor (i.e., task specialization) in an unstructured population by assuming that the individuals have different propensities to work on different tasks. The incentive to…
Using CPS data for 1976 to 2022 we explore how wage inequality has evolved for married couples with both spouses working full time full year, and its impact on household income inequality. We also investigate how marriage sorting patterns…
We propose a new approach to estimate government worker skills, a setting where output is hard to observe and wages may be uninformative about skills. The approach uses wages in comparable jobs in the private sector and machine learning…
We study the interplay of information and prior (mis)perceptions in a Phelps-Aigner-Cain-type model of statistical discrimination in the labor market. We decompose the effect on average pay of an increase in how informative observables are…
An employer contracts with a worker to incentivize efforts whose productivity depends on ability; the worker then enters a market that pays him contingent on ability evaluation. With non-additive monitoring technology, the interdependence…
This paper develops a new framework to analyze the incidence of labor market shocks, focusing on automation and artificial intelligence. Central to our theory is the distance-dependent elasticity of substitution (DIDES), where worker…
This paper examines labor market polarization through a comparative analysis of skill-based employment and wage distributions in India and the United States during 2018-2023, with particular attention to differential automation risks and AI…
Reward-free, unsupervised discovery of skills is an attractive alternative to the bottleneck of hand-designing rewards in environments where task supervision is scarce or expensive. However, current skill pre-training methods, like many RL…
During the past decades the importance of soft skills for labour market outcomes has grown substantially. This carries implications for labour market inequality, since previous research shows that soft skills are not valued equally across…
The problem addressed in this article is the bias to income and expenditure elasticities estimated on pseudo-panel data caused by measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity. We gauge empirically these biases by comparing…