Since changes in trade openness are typically confounded with other factors, it has been difficult to identify the labor market consequences of increased international trade. The advent of the United States Interstate Highway System provides a unique policy experiment, which I use to identify...

How do firms respond to technological advances that facilitate the automation of tasks? Which tasks will they automate, and what types of worker will be replaced as a result? We present a model that distinguishes between a task's engineering complexity and its training requirements. When two...

This paper develops a model of trade that features heterogeneous firms, technology choice and different types of skilled labor in a general equilibrium framework. Its main contribution is to explain the impact of trade integration on technology adoption and wage inequalities. It also provides...

A general equilibrium model of individual specialization is presented in which agents trade off the productivity and price implications of producing a narrower range of goods. Agents with highly specific skills turn out to benefit most from large markets. The model is able to replicate features...

Labor's share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network...

Profit share in Italy has been growing between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, remaining stable at historically high levels since than. After dropping in the first half of the 1070s, owing to an unprecedented rapid rise in wages, profit share started to recover. The rise during the 1980s...

This paper tracks the rise in the percentage of employees who have never become union members (¿nevermembers¿) since the early 1980s and shows that it is the reduced likelihood of ever becoming a member rather than the haemorrhaging of existing members which is behind the decline in overall...

This paper explains why some employees who favor unionization fail to join, and why others who wish to abandon union membership continue paying dues. Our explanation is based on a model where employees incur switching (search) costs when attempting to abandon (acquire) union membership....

The labor search and matching model plays a growing role in macroeconomic analysis. This paper provides a critical, selective survey of the literature. Four fundamental questions are explored: how are unemployment, job vacancies, and employment determined as equilibrium phenomena? What...

In the UK the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but after ten years after labour market entry, there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points. This paper explores the reason for this gender gap in early-career wage growth, considering three main hypotheses -...