We analyze how relative wage movements across birth cohorts and education groups during the 1980s affected the distribution of household consumption. The analysis integrates the labor economics literature on time variation in the wage structure with the consumption insurance literature. In...

Building on Baker, Bloom and Davis (2016), I construct a monthly index of Global Economic Policy Uncertainty (GEPU) from January 1997. The GEPU Index is a GDP-weighted average of national EPU indices for 16 countries that account for two-thirds of global output. Each national EPU index reflects...

When match formation is costly and wage determination is decentralized, privately optimal investments in job and worker quality diverge from socially efficient outcomes. To explore this issue, I consider search equilibrium environments with endogenous quality distributions for jobs and workers....

This paper investigates movements in relative wages and wage inequality across thirteen of the world's major economies. Focusing on wages received by full-time male workers, the investigation uncovers several empirical regularities: (1) Most advanced industrialized economies show increases,...

I review evidence of rising policy uncertainty in the U.S. and global economies, drawing heavily on newspaper-based measures. Examples from countries around the world illustrate the role of political and policy developments as drivers of fluctuations in economic uncertainty. I also highlight the...

The COVID-19 pandemic instigated a big shift in working arrangements. I first describe the scale of this shift in the United States, drawing on the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes and other sources. I then review differences, circa 2023, in work-from-home rates across industries,...

Two extraordinary U.S. labor market developments facilitated the sharp disinflation in 2022-23 without raising the unemployment rate. First, pandemic-driven infection worries and social distancing intentions caused a sizable drag on labor force participation that began to reverse in the first...

Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20-64 years old, as of mid 2023, according to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s that we estimate in time-use data. We...

The Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) underpins many studies of firm-level behavior. It tracks longitudinally all employers in the nonfarm private sector but lacks information about business financing and owner characteristics. We address this shortcoming by linking LBD...

Guided by a simple theory of task assignment and time allocation, we investigate the long run response to national differences in tax rates on labor income, payrolls and consumption. The theory implies that higher tax rates reduce work time in the market sector, increase the size of the shadow...