Why do some occupations pay increasingly more than others over time? To answer this question, I combine hand-collected historical labor market data with a theory-guided accounting framework that allows me to decompose occupational wage inequality into two groups of explanations: productivity and rent sharing. In order to implement this decomposition, I use an equilibrium model of search and matching to derive a mapping from unobserved wage markdowns due to search frictions into a set of measurable labor market statistics for each occupation. I find that productivity, as opposed to rent sharing, explains most of the occupational wage inequality, both in the cross section and over time.
This paper studies the 2015 European refugee crisis and its effects on electoral support for Germany's far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). To identify the causal effects of refugee presence and address potential endogeneity of refugee's location choice, I exploit two unique features of the refugee placement process in Germany that serve as instrumental variables. The first approach uses German laws going back to 1949 that determine the allocation of refugees at the district level. The second approach exploits the fact that at the height of the crisis, many refugees were housed in military barracks that had been decommissioned prior to the refugee crisis. I find that a one percent increase in the presence of refugees within a district leads to a one percent decline in support for the AfD between the 2013 and 2017 federal elections. I probe potential mechanisms as to why this might be the case and find support for the contact hypothesis, namely that districts in which natives have more interactions with refugees see a larger decline in support for the AfD.
Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics Vol 3(2024-4)
This paper successfully replicates Autor et al. (2008) and extends their analysis through 2022. The extension to an additional 17 years of analysis underscores the original finding that rising wage inequality was not an episodic event of the 1980s. That being said, overall 90/10 inequality and the college wage premium have plateaued since 2005. Despite overall inequality plateauing, upper-tail 90/50 inequality has continued to increase since 1980 for both men and women. I also find that the composition-adjusted real wages of high school dropouts has caught up with high school graduates in the last decade. Between 2012 and 2022, high school dropouts saw larger real wage gains than any other education group. The combination of these findings is consistent with rising polarization in which employment and wages expand for high-wage and low-wage work.
I document trends in the large-firm wage premium across 26 European countries and the United States. To do so, I use Eurostat's Structure of Earnings Survey, a harmonized dataset with detailed information on employers and workers. For the U.S., I use two restricted microdatasets from the BLS: the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, and Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. Based on a model of labor market frictions and differing workforce composition at firms, I quantify the role of an aging workforce to country differences in the large-firm wage premium.
with Nils Lehr
We depart from the competitive labor market setting of the task model. To do so, we extend the framework of Helpman et al. (2010) by incorporating the task-based framework following Acemoglu & Autor (2011). Our model offers new insights into the effects of automation, task allocation, and search frictions for labor market outcomes. By embedding the task model in a non-competitive labor market setting, our model offers a richer understanding of the impact of technological change on labor demand, wage inequality, and overall wage structures.
with Vikram Dixit
We build a dataset of historical job advertisements from a U.S. newspaper of record that spans most of the 20th century. We measure gender bias at the occupation, skill, and firm level. We find that ads for jobs with task requirements that are people-facing are the most gendered. We interpret these facts through the lens of a task model of occupational sorting to quantify the effect of discrimination.