We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals' life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life. Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their...

It is generally agreed upon that most individuals who acquire a college degree do so in their early 20s. Despite this consensus, we show that in the US from the 1930 birth cohort onwards a large fraction - around 20% - of college graduates obtained their degree after age 30. We explore the...

Employment and participation rates for US prime age women rose steadily during the second half of the 20th century. In the last 30 years, however, those rates stagnated, even as employment and participation rates for women in other industrialized countries continued to rise. I discuss the role...

We use novel surveys of firms and workers, linked to administrative employer-employee data, to study the prevalence and importance of individual bargaining in wage determination. We show that simple survey questions accurately elicit firms' bargaining strategies. Using the elicited strategies...

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...

We investigate compensation policies in family and non-family firms using a novel employer-employee matched dataset comprising nearly the universe of Italian incorporated firms and ownership information. Family firms pay significantly lower wages and offer slower and less rewarding careers....

In this paper, we develop a model that combines elements of modern macro labor theories with nominal wage rigidities to study the consequences of unexpected inflation on the labor market. The slow and costly adjustment of real wages within a match after a burst of inflation incentivizes workers...

Most economists maintain that the labor market in the United States is 'tight' because unemployment rates are low. They infer from this that there is potential for wage-push inflation. However, real wages are falling rapidly at present and, prior to that, real wages had been stagnant for some...