This paper summarizes statistics on the key aspects of the distribution of earnings levels and earnings changes using administrative (social security) data from Italy between 1985 and 2016. During the time covered by our data, earnings inequality and earnings volatility increased, while earnings...

We analyze the effect of labor mobility and innovation on productivity growth. With event-study analysis based on exogenous worker deaths and shift-share international trade shocks, we show that both the extent and direction of worker mobility affect firm productivity. We develop a...

Combining weekly productivity data with weekly productivity beliefs for a large sample of truckers over 2 years, we show that workers tend to systematically and persistently overpredict their productivity. If workers are overconfident about their own productivity at the current firm relative to...

Are there long-term labor consequences in migrating to the US during a recession? For most immigrants, credibly estimating this effect is difficult because of selective migration. Some immigrants may not move if economic conditions are not favorable. However, identification is possible for...

In a seminal paper Graetz and Michaels (2018) find that robots increase labor productivity and TFP, lower output prices and adversely affect the employment share of low-skilled labor. We show that these effects hold only, when comparing hardly-robotizing with highly-robotizing sectors and...

This paper proposes a new approach to estimate task prices per efficiency unit of skill in the Roy model. I show how the sorting of workers into tasks and their associated wage growth can be used to identify changes in task prices under relatively weak assumptions. The estimation exploits the...

This article investigates the extent to which personality traits and cognitive skills can be seen as potential determinants of overeducation, and can explain the overeducation wage penalty. Using a representative survey of the Polish working-age population with well-established measures of...

Drawing on newly available panel data, this paper presents an empirical analysis of the wage effects of changing job tasks, assessed for individuals at their workplace. I am therefore able to exploit within-occupation within-individual variation, over time, to study wage returns to cognitive,...

We characterize the salient features of the distribution of (log) earnings of formal workers in Mexico using social security records for the period 2005-2019. The analysis is based on a nonparametric approach and is focused primarily on the properties of the distribution of earnings changes. We...