We study the impact on the skill premium of increases in the quality of goods consumed by households ("trading up"). Our empirical work shows that high- quality goods are more intensive in skilled labor than low-quality goods and that household spending on high-quality goods rises with income....

We study the impact on the skill premium of increases in the quality of goods consumed by households (“trading up”). Our empirical work shows that high- quality goods are more intensive in skilled labor than low-quality goods and that household spending on high-quality goods rises with...

One of the key questions in the study of regulation is whether the costs of regulatory compliance fall homogeneously on all businesses or whether certain firms, for instance small ones, are especially penalized. We quantify firms’ compliance costs in terms of their labor spending to adhere to...

Firm location affects firm risk through local factor prices. We find more procyclical factor prices such as wages and real estate prices in areas with more cyclical economies, namely high “local beta” areas. While procyclical wages provide a natural hedge against aggregate shocks and reduce...

One of the key questions in the study of regulation is whether the costs of regulatory compliance fall homogeneously on all businesses or whether certain firms, for instance small ones, are especially penalized. We quantify firms' compliance costs in terms of their labor spending to adhere to...

We quantify firms' regulatory compliance costs from 2002 to 2014 in terms of their labor spending to adhere to government rules. Detailed establishment-level occupation data, in combination with occupation-specific task information, allow us to recover the share of an establishment's wage bill...

What are the effects of recent advances in Generative AI on the value of firms? Our study offers a quantitative answer to this question for U.S. publicly traded companies based on the exposures of their workforce to Generative AI. Our novel firm-level measure of workforce exposure to Generative...

Employability is a key issue in graduates’ job-hunting, but little research has been done on that of the graduates in Chinese universities. These universities have been experiencing a decline in their graduate employment since the past decade. This paper attempts to tackle this issue. It...

Manufacturing-heavy US regions recently saw lower employment and income growth. Exploiting data on tens of millions of housing transactions, we show that house prices grew by less in the same regions, a pattern exaggerated for the lowest-value homes. Counterfactual accounting exercises reveal...