Search Results
Journal Article
Labor Market Conditions Have Eased, but Why? A State-Level View
An analysis examines how changes in labor supply and labor demand contributed to loosening state and national job market conditions in 2023.
Working Paper
The Future of Labor: Automation and the Labor Share in the Second Machine Age
We study the effect of modern automation on firm-level labor shares using a 2018 survey of 1,618 manufacturing firms in China. We exploit geographic and industry variation built into the design of subsidies for automation paid under a vast government industrialization program, “Made In China 2025,” to construct an instrument for automation investment. We use a canonical CES framework of automation and develop a novel methodology to structurally estimate the elasticity of substitution between labor and automation capital among automating firms, which for our preferred specification is 3.8. ...
Working Paper
Upskilling: do employers demand greater skill when skilled workers are plentiful?
The Great Recession and subsequent recovery have been particularly painful for low-skilled workers. From 2007 to 2012, the unemployment rate rose by 6.4 percentage points for noncollege workers while it rose by only 2.3 percentage points for the college educated. This differential impact was evident within occupations as well. One explanation for the differential impact may be the ability of highly skilled workers to take middle- and low-skilled jobs. Indeed, over this period the share of workers with a college degree in traditionally middle-skill occupations increased rapidly. Such growth in ...
Journal Article
Wage Pressures in the Labor Market: What Do They Say?
Wage pressures among the newly employed in low-wage service occupations appear to be the result of normal economic forces, likely reflecting demand surges for—and a reluctant supply of—workers in occupations particularly hard hit by pandemic-induced economic shutdowns.
Working Paper
Do Human Capital Adjustments Protect Youths from Structural Change?
Structural changes to labor demand can have lasting consequences on the employment and earnings of workers in affected industries and geographies. However, individuals coming of age may avoid similar fates if they internalize salient changes to the returns to education and adjust their human capital investments. This paper studies the effects of exposure to structural labor demand shocks during youth and adolescence on human capital accumulation and later-life earnings. I use student-level administrative data from Texas and a modified difference-in-differences design that compares changes in ...
Working Paper
Employment Dynamics in a Signaling Model with Workers' Incentives
Many firms adjust employment in a "lumpy" manner -- infrequently and in large bursts. In this paper, I show that lumpy adjustments can arise from concerns about the incentives of remaining workers. Specifically, I develop a model in which a firm's productivity depends on its workers' effort and workers' income prospects depend on the firm's profitability. I use this model to analyze the consequences of demand shocks that are observed by the firm but not by its workers, who can only try to infer the firm's profitability from its employment decisions. I show that the resulting signaling model ...
Discussion Paper
The Anatomy of Labor Demand Pre‑ and Post‑COVID
Has labor demand changed since the COVID-19 pandemic? In this post, we leverage detailed data on the universe of U.S. online job listings to study the dynamics of labor demand pre- and post-COVID. We find that there has been a significant shift in listings out of the central cities and into the “fringe” portion of large metro areas, smaller metro areas, and rural areas. We also find a substantial decline in job listings in computer and mathematical and business and financial operations occupations, and a corresponding increase in job openings in sales, office and administrative support, ...
Working Paper
Job Polarization and the Natural Rate of Unemployment in the United States
I present a new estimate of the natural rate of unemployment in the United States that accounts for changes in the age, sex, and skill composition of the labor force. Using micro-level data from the Current Population Survey for the period 1994-2017, I find that the natural rate of unemployment declined by 0.5 percentage point since 1994 and currently stands at 4.5 percent. My projections show that ongoing demographic and technological changes could lower the trend rate further to 4.4 percent by the end of 2022.
Discussion Paper
Wage Pressures in the Labor Market: What Do They Say?
Wage pressures among the newly employed in low-wage service occupations appear to be the result of normal economic forces, likely reflecting demand surges for—and a reluctant supply of—workers in occupations particularly hard hit by pandemic-induced economic shutdowns.
Working Paper
Downskilling: changes in employer skill requirements over the business cycle
Using a novel database of 82.5 million online job postings, we show that employer skill requirements fell as the labor market improved from 2010 to 2014. We find that a 1 percentage point reduction in the local unemployment rate is associated with a roughly 0.27 percentage point reduction in the fraction of jobs requiring at least a bachelor?s degree and a roughly 0.23 percentage point reduction in the fraction requiring five or more years of experience. This pattern is established using multiple measures of labor availability, is bolstered by similar trends along heretofore unmeasured ...