Labor Markets

This book provides new evidence for the Impact of the Internet on jobs. All of the empirical articles indicate that the Internet has indeed created many new jobs, but that a large number of jobs may have been destroyed or downgraded, at least in the short run. Furthermore, routinization, job market polarisation and new labour market inequalities have emerged. Thus, while the diffusion of the Internet is generating opportunities it also comes with ambiguous trends that by themselves will not generate a more resilient and inclusive labour market.

This paper documents how life cycle wage growth varies across countries. We harmonize repeated cross-sectional surveys from a set of countries of all income levels and then measure how wages rise with potential experience. Our main finding is that experience-wage profiles are on average twice as steep in rich countries as in poor countries. In addition, more educated workers have steeper profiles than the less educated; this accounts for around one-third of cross-country differences in aggregate profiles.

Although women pursue managerial credentials at nearly the same rate as men, gender disparities in wages exist because of the shortfall in wages women sustain relative to men at the onset of their careers. This article develops a tryout approach to test for the presence of demand-side contributions to initial wage inequality while also developing and testing theory on why it may be lessened through internships.

We document a large decrease in earnings inequality in Brazil between 1996 and 2012. Using administrative linked employer-employee data, we fit high-dimensional worker and firm fixed effects models to understand the sources of this decrease. Firm effects account for 40 percent of the total decrease and worker effects for 29 percent. Changes in observable worker and firm characteristics contributed little to these trends. Instead, the decrease is primarily due to a compression of returns to these characteristics, particularly a declining firm productivity pay premium.

This paper assesses cross-country variation in life-cycle human capital accumulation, using new evidence from US immigrants. The returns to experience accumulated in an immigrant's birth country before migrating are positively correlated with birth-country GDP per capita. To understand this fact, we build a model of life-cycle human capital accumulation that features three potential theories: differential human capital accumulation, differential selection, and differential skill loss.

This paper shows that local economic shocks spill over to distant regions through firms' internal networks, and that such spillovers matter economically by affecting aggregate employment in those regions. Using confidential micro data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that establishment-level employment responds strongly to shocks in other regions in which the firm is operating. Consistent with theory, the elasticity of establishment-level employment with respect to shocks in other regions increases with firms' financial constraints.

In a recent study, we investigated the relationship between network-based hiring and subsequent employee promotions, comparing results across different demographic groups. Specifically, we examined the personnel records of nearly 16,000 employees hired from 2003 to 2013 in a large U.S.-based sales organization. The privately owned firm has offices worldwide, though our study focused on offices in the U.S.

I model an economy inhabited by heterogeneous individuals that form teams and choose an appropriate production technology. The model characterizes how the technological environment shapes the equilibrium assignment of individuals into teams. I apply the theoretical insights to study cross-country differences in the allocation of talent and technology.

Schools across the globe routinely organize students by grade levels, where individuals of a similar age are taught together. Children typically enter school with members of their cohort, as determined by a date-of-birth cutoff, and advance one grade level per year. Undoubtedly, this practice arises from the notion that some form of tracking, ie grouping together students with relatively similar levels of knowledge and maturity, is the most efficient way to provide instruction.