This paper quantifies the extent to which the U.S. manufacturing labor market is characterized by employer market power and how such market power has changed over time. We find that the vast majority of U.S. manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment and, at least since the...

This paper studies long-run differences in intergenerational occupational mobility between Black and White Americans. Combining data from linked historical censuses and contemporary large-scale surveys, we provide a comprehensive set of mobility measures based on Markov chains that trace the...

According to culinary scholars, American food retained a strongly British character through most of its history. Chinese food was the exception. Beginning in the early-twentieth century, Chinese restaurants began appearing outside of Chinatowns and the cuisine entered the cultural mainstream....

Prisoners employed in manufacturing constitute 4.2% of total U.S. manufacturing employment in 2005; they produce cheap goods, creating labor demand shock. I study the economic externalities of convict labor on local labor markets and firms. Using newly collected panel data on U.S. prisons and...

This paper shows that immigration fostered the emergence of organized labor in the United States. I digitize archival data to construct the first county-level dataset on historical U.S. union membership and use a shift-share instrument to isolate a plausibly exogenous shock to the labor supply...

Why have the real (consumption) wages of U.S. workers risen since the nineteenth century? Some economists answer that increases in real wages have followed increases in labor productivity over time. In this paper, this hypothesized association is confronted with annual observations of changes in...

This paper argues that labour market flexibility is commonly examined lop-sidely, and that it should be examined more broadly including flexibility for the needs of employees as well as those for employers. It uses the data from the European Survey of Working-Time and Work-life Balance, a survey...

Poland's current challenge is to complete its transition to a fully developed market economy, while advancing towards integration into the European Union. This paper is devoted to analyzing the Polish labor market's main institutions, circa 1995, in the areas of labor reallocation, wage setting,...