The authors use case study evidence from hospitals and auto parts manufacturers to investigate why employers used - and even increased their use of - temporary help agencies during a period of tight labor markets in the 1990s. In high-skill occupations, the evidence suggests employers paid...

While the utopian vision of the current Information Age was that computerization would flatten economic hierarchies by democratizing information, the opposite has occurred. Information, it turns out, is merely an input into a more consequential economic function, decision-making, which is the...

An emerging literature argues that changes in the allocation of workplace "tasks" between capital and labor, and between domestic and foreign workers, has altered the structure of labor demand in industrialized countries and fostered employment polarization - that is, rising employment in the...