Other Research

Is Automation Labor-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share

Many technological innovations replace workers with machines, but this capital-labor substitution need not reduce aggregate labor demand because it simultaneously induces four countervailing responses: own-industry output effects; cross-industry input–output effects; between-industry shifts; and final demand effects. We quantify these channels using four decades of harmonized cross-country and industry data, where we measure automation as industry-level movements in total factor productivity (TFP) that are common across countries.

Incarceration Spillovers in Criminal and Family Networks

Using quasi-random assignment of criminal cases to judges, we estimate large incarceration spillovers in criminal and brother networks. When a defendant is sent to prison, there are 51 and 32 percentage point reductions in the probability his criminal network members and younger brothers will be charged with a crime, respectively, over the ensuing four years. Correlational evidence misleadingly finds small positive effects.

A Relational Inequality Approach to First- and Second-Generation Immigrant Earnings in German Workplaces

We conceptualize immigrant incorporation as a categorically driven process and contrast the bright distinctions between first-generation immigrants and natives, with more blurry second-generation contrasts. We analyze linked employer-employee data of a sample of 5,097 employees in 97 large German organizations and focus on first- and second-generation immigrants. We explore how generational status in the labor market and workplace contexts expands and contracts native-immigrant wage inequalities.

XX>XY?: The Changing Female Advantage in Life Expectancy

Females live longer than males in most parts of the world today. Among OECD nations in recent years, the difference in life expectancy at birth is around four to six years (seven in Japan). But have women always lived so much longer than men? The answer is that they have not. We ask when and why the female advantage emerged. We show that reductions in maternal mortality and fertility are not the reasons. Rather, we argue that the sharp reduction in infectious disease in the early twentieth century played a role.

The Uptick in Income Segregation: Real Trend or Random Sampling Variation?

Recent trends in income segregation in metropolitan regions show that, after a decline in the 1990s, there was an increase in 2000–2010 that reinforced concerns about the overall growth in U.S. income inequality since the 1970s. Yet the evidence may be systematically biased to exacerbate the upward trend because the effective sample for the American Community Survey (ACS) is much smaller than it was for the 2000 census to which it is being compared.

The Race Between Man and Machine: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment

We examine the concerns that new technologies will render labor redundant in a framework in which tasks previously performed by labor can be automated and new versions of existing tasks, in which labor has a comparative advantage, can be created. In a static version where capital is fixed and technology is exogenous, automation reduces employment and the labor share, and may even reduce wages, while the creation of new tasks has the opposite effects. Our full model endogenizes capital accumulation and the direction of research toward automation and the creation of new tasks.

How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America: Musical Purification and Cross-Class Inclusion at the New York Philharmonic

This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find support for the classic account of high culture’s purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class.

The Poverty Reduction of Social Security and Means-Tested Transfers

Many studies examine the anti-poverty effects of social insurance and means-tested transfers, relying solely on survey data with substantial errors. We improve on past work by linking administrative data from Social Security and five large means-tested transfers (SSI, SNAP, Public Assistance, the EITC, and housing assistance) to 2008-2013 Survey of Income and Program Participation data. Using the linked data, we find that Social Security cuts the poverty rate by a third – more than twice the combined effect of the five means-tested transfers.

Formerly Incarcerated Parents and Their Children

The negative effects of incarceration on child well-being are often linked to the economic insecurity of formerly incarcerated parents. Researchers caution, however, that the effects of parental incarceration may be small in the presence of multiple-partner fertility and other family complexity. Despite these claims, few studies have directly observed either economic insecurity or the full extent of family complexity.

Children and the Elderly: Wealth Inequality Among America’s Dependents

Life cycle theory predicts that elderly households have higher levels of wealth than households with children, but these wealth gaps are likely dynamic, responding to changes in labor market conditions, patterns of debt accumulation, and the overall economic context. Using Survey of Consumer Finances data from 1989 through 2013, we compare wealth levels between and within the two groups that make up America’s dependents: the elderly and child households (households with a resident child aged 18 or younger).

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