During the 1980s, the wage gap between white women and white men in the US declined by approximately 1 percentage point per year. In the decades since, the rate of gender wage convergence has stalled to less than one-third of its previous value. An outstanding puzzle in economics is "why did...

We study the effects of job-protected leave policies on intergenerational mobility, long-run child outcomes, and parental decisions (labor market, investments in children, and fertility). We merge rich sources of historical information on family leave policies across the United States since 1973...

This paper analyzes the impact of paid family leave (PFL) policies on informal and formal care for middle-aged and older adults with disabilities in the U.S., and how the heterogeneous benefits accrue to different families. We use data from the 1998-2018 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and...

Using administrative data on health insurance, retirement, and leave benefits, we find within-firm variation accounts for a dramatically lower percentage of total variation in benefits than in wages. We also document sharply higher between-firm variation in nonwage benefits than in wages. We...

Many developing countries would like to increase the share of modern or formal sectors in their employment. One way to accomplish this goal may be to encourage the entrance of foreign firms. They are typically relatively large, with high productivity and good access to foreign markets, and might...

At the onset of the COVID pandemic, the U.S. economy suddenly and swiftly lost 20 million jobs. Over the next two years, the economy has been on the recovery path. We assess the labor market two years into the COVID crisis. We show that early employment dynamics were almost entirely driven by...

We examine the repercussions of protectionist policies implemented in the United States since 2018 on the composition of workforce and career choices within the semiconductor industry. We find that the shift towards protectionism, aimed at reviving domestic manufacturing and employment,...

We study how labor market conditions affect unionization decisions. Tight labor markets might spur unionization, e.g., by reducing the threat of unemployment after management opposition or employer retaliation in response to a unionization attempt. Tightness might also weaken unionization by...

Using population-level administrative data, we study labor market externalities stemming from age-specific employment protection legislation (EPL) targeted towards older workers. Our results show no economically meaningful overall effects of the EPL on employment or earnings of either men or...

We expand the analysis of cyclical changes in labor demand by decomposing changes along the intensive margin into those in days/week and in hours/day. Using large cross sections of U.S. data, 1985-2018, we observe around 1/4 of the adjustment in weekly hours occurring through changing days/week....