Underrepresented minority (URM) college students have been steadily earning degrees in relatively less-lucrative fields of study since the mid-1990s. A decomposition reveals that this widening gap is principally explained by rising stratification at public research universities, many of which...

This paper studies how college major choices shape earnings and fertility outcomes. Using administrative data that link students' preferences, random assignment to majors, and post-college outcomes, we estimate the causal pecuniary and nonpecuniary returns to different fields of study. We...

This paper documents the labour market position of artists across Europe and examines how it co-varies with public cultural spending. Using EU-LFS micro-data for 2009-2023, we compare artists to non-artists using harmonised measures of wage rank, employment, and non-standard work. Using...

We propose a new approach to estimate selection-corrected quantiles of the gender wage gap. Our method employs instrumental variables that explain variation in the latent variable but, conditional on the latent process, do not directly affect selection. We provide semiparametric identification...

Using 1979-2019 Current Population Survey data, we study the effect of state and federal minimum wage policies on gender, race, and ethnic inequality. We find that minimum wages substantially reduce intergroup wage inequality at least up to the 20th wage percentile, with no evidence of adverse...

We show that executives' early-life poverty experiences reduce both internal (executive-employee) and external (executive-peer) corporate pay disparities. Three mechanisms drive this effect: increased risk aversion in poverty-exposed executives, strategic avoidance of negative media coverage to...

National payroll data reveal that men are paid more than women when they enter firms in Great Britain. Although this hiring wage gap has narrowed over the past two decades, it still accounts for over two-thirds of the steady-state gender pay gap – the wage gap that would eventually...

How large is the gender pay gap among university professors, and how do institutional pay-setting mechanisms shape this disparity? This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the gender pay gap among professors at a renowned German university. Using detailed human resources data for the time...

This study examines how automation, measured by industrial robot adoption and artificial intelligence (AI) exposure, is associated with labor market and production outcomes across Europe. Using a panel dataset covering 32 European countries and 18 industries from 1994 to 2019, we analyze the...

Empirical studies of racial wage disparities typically rely on self-reported race and treat racial categories as fixed. This paper shows that racial classification in the labor market is produced by social perception, and that modeling this perception process is essential for measuring wage...

This study is the first to analyse the determinants and wage impacts of vertical educational mismatches in the wage sector in Indonesia. This study is also the first to examine the wage effect of vertical educational mismatch based on the fields of study, gender, and spatial conditions of the...

Immigrants across Europe earn less and work in lower-quality jobs than natives, but the mechanisms underlying these disparities remain poorly understood. This paper asks whether immigrant disadvantage reflects barriers to accessing good jobs or skill deficits that persist even within similar...

This study documents a new fact about educational production: Students' relative standing in noncognitive skills has lasting effects on educational trajectories that are distinct from those of absolute skill levels and cognitive achievement. Using administrative data covering the universe of...

This paper replicates and extends the evidence on the lifetime effects of school starting age on earnings by Fredriksson and Öckert (2014) for Sweden. Using German data for individuals born between 1945 and 1965, we examine a more rigid system of ability tracking in secondary education, a...

Using 1980-2019 Danish matched employer-employee data, we unpack the rise in wage sorting - the correlation between worker and firm wage fixed effects (Abowd et al., 1999) - from 0.06 to 0.18. The rise is driven entirely by reallocation of employment from persistently low-sorting to persistently...

Ours is the first meta-analysis synthesizing results from econometric studies carried out in the UK to assess the size of the gender wage gap (GWG). Drawing on 90 primary studies published between 1974 and 2024 we assess trends in the gap and identify the substantive and methodological factors...

The H-1B program lets firms hire high-skill foreign workers for a six-year term. The annual number of visas allocated to for-profit firms is capped at 85,000 and there is excess demand for those visas. The analysis merges administrative data, including the I-129 petitions that report the wage...

This study examines the extent to which market size disparity across franchises - measured as the coefficient of variation of MSA populations - moderates the effectiveness of competitive balance interventions (CBIs) in Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Football League (NFL), the National...

Many couples face a trade-off between advancing one spouse's career or the other's. We study this trade-off using administrative data from Germany and Sweden. Using an event study approach, we find that when couples move across commuting zones, men's earnings increase more than women's. To...

A central effect of automation is to transform jobs-shifting their task content. We develop a general-equilibrium model of this process. Occupations bundle tasks; workers possess task-specific skills and sort by comparative advantage. When a task is automated, remaining tasks gain in importance,...

Artificial intelligence is changing which tasks workers do and how they do them. Predicting its labor market consequences requires understanding how technical change affects workers’ productivity across tasks, how workers adapt by changing occupations and acquiring new skills, and how wages...

Gender gaps in earnings persist even among high-skilled workers, partly because men and women often perform different tasks within and across jobs. We study a rare setting in which high-skilled men and women perform the same tasks under comparable conditions, allowing us to assess gender...

Female students are less likely to be identified as intellectually gifted than male students when the identification process follows a two-stage procedure. We posit and quantify two mechanisms that explain this gender gap. First, at any level of IQ, but especially at high levels of IQ, male...

The US government in 2025 imposed a $100,000 tax on each high-skill foreign worker entering with an H-1B work visa. The only public economic justification calculates the tax to offset an estimated wage penalty for H-1B workers relative to US natives. But this estimate suffers from substantial...

We propose a new approach to estimate selection-corrected quantiles of the gender wage gap. Our method employs instrumental variables that explain variation in the latent variable but, conditional on the latent process, do not directly affect selection. We provide semiparametric identification...

This paper examines the relationship between labour market concentration and wage inequality using global survey data for the period 2006-2022. The results show that higher labour market concentration is associated with higher wage inequality, especially in the top half of the wage distribution....

Persistent gender gaps in self-promotion contribute to unequal labor market outcomes. In this study, we investigate how AI-assisted writing tools shape selfpromotion, and, as a secondary outcome, confidence and how these effects interact with gender. For this purpose, we conducted an online...

This paper investigates the labour market consequences of motherhood in Italy, with a focus on how institutional and local contexts shape the child penalty. Using administrative data from the Italian National Social Security Institute (INPS), we track the labour market trajectories of mothers in...

We study the part-time penalty. Using Danish register data, the Danish Labor Force Survey, and hospital personnel records, we show that the pay gap between part-time and full-time workers is sizable and increases over the career because the two groups accumulate different levels of human capital...

We examine the wage returns to host-country work experience among immigrants by reconstructing full employment histories using Swedish pension records and longitudinal matched employer–employee data. Our findings show that: (i) returns to experience are sizable and concave, consistent with...

Gender gaps in earnings persist even among high-skilled workers, in part because men and women often perform different tasks within and across jobs. We study a rare setting in which high-skilled men and women perform the same tasks under comparable conditions, allowing us to assess gender...

This paper provides the first comprehensive, cross-country evidence on the wage returns to digital skills, using more than 67 million job postings from 29 countries between 2021 and 2024. The paper develops a harmonized digital skills taxonomy and examines returns across extensive (any digital...