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COVID-Induced Economic Uncertainty

Assessing the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is essential for policymakers, but challenging because the crisis has unfolded with extreme speed. We identify three indicators – stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic uncertainty, and subjective uncertainty in business expectation surveys – that provide real-time forward-looking uncertainty measures. We use these indicators to document and quantify the enormous increase in economic uncertainty in the past several weeks.

What Caused Racial Disparities in Particulate Exposure to Fall? New Evidence from the Clean Air Act and Satellite-Based Measures of Air Quality

Racial differences in exposure to ambient air pollution have declined significantly in the United States over the past 20 years. This project links restricted-access Census Bureau microdata to newly available, spatially continuous high resolution measures of ambient particulate pollution (PM2.5) to examine the underlying causes and consequences of differences in black-white pollution exposures. We begin by decomposing differences in pollution exposure into components explained by observable population characteristics (e.g., income) versus those that remain unexplained.

Unpacking Skill Bias: Automation and New Tasks

The standard approach to modeling inequality, building on Tinbergen's seminal work, assumes factor-augmenting technologies and technological change biased in favor of skilled workers. Though this approach has been successful in conceptualizing and documenting the race between technology and education, it is restrictive in a number of crucial respects. First, it predicts that technological improvements should increase the real wages of all workers. Second, it requires sizable productivity growth to account for realistic changes in relative wages.

Relative Sizes of Age Cohorts and Labor Force Participation of Older Workers

We study the effects of the size of older cohorts on labor force participation and wages of older workers in the United States. We use panel data on states, treating the age structure of the population as endogenous, owing to migration. When older cohorts (50–59 or 60–69) are large relative to a young cohort (aged 16–24), the evidence fits the relative supply hypothesis. However, when older cohorts are large relative to 25- to 49-year-olds, the evidence points to a relative demand shift.

Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization

We measure trends in affective polarization in nine OECD countries over the past four decades. The US experienced the largest increase in polarization over this period. Three countries experienced a smaller increase in polarization. Five countries experienced a decrease in polarization.

Caught between Cultures: Unintended Consequences of Improving Opportunity for Immigrant Girls

What happens when immigrant girls are given increased opportunities to integrate into the workplace and society, but their parents value more traditional cultural outcomes? Building on Akerlof and Kranton's identity framework (2000), we construct a simple game-theoretic model which shows how expanding opportunities for immigrant girls can have the unintended consequence of reducing their well-being, since identity-concerned parents will constrain their daughter's choices.

Skill Prices, Occupations, and Changes in the Wage Structure for Low Skilled Men

This paper studies the effect of the change in occupational structure on wages for low skilled men. We develop a model of occupational choice in which workers have multi-dimensional skills that are exploited differently across different occupations. We allow for a rich specification of technological change which has heterogenous effects on different occupations and different parts of the skill distribution.

Income and Wealth Volatility: Evidence from Italy and the U.S. in the Past Two Decades

Income volatility and wealth volatility are central objects of investigation for the literature on income and wealth inequality and dynamics. Here we analyse the two concepts in a comparative perspective for the same individuals in Italy and the U.S. over the last two decades. Contrary to our expectations, we find that in both countries wealth volatility reaches significantly higher values than income volatility, the effect being mostly driven by changes in the market value of real estate assets.

Gender Pay Gaps in U.S. Federal Science Agencies: An Organizational Approach

This study advances understanding of gender pay gaps by examining organizational variation. The gender pay gap literature supplies mechanisms but does not attend to organizational variation; the gender and science literature provides insights on the role of masculinist culture in disciplines but misses pay gap mechanisms. A data set of federal workers allows comparison of men and women in the same jobs and workplaces. Agencies associated with traditionally masculine (engineering, physical sciences) and gender-neutral (biological, interdisciplinary sciences) fields differ.

Gender Inequality in Product Markets: When and How Status Beliefs Transfer to Products

This paper develops and evaluates a theory of status belief transfer, the process by which gender status beliefs differentially affect the evaluations of products made by men and women. We conduct three online experiments to evaluate this theory. In Study 1, we gathered 50 product categories from a large online retailer and had participants rate each product’s association with femininity and masculinity. We find evidence of the pervasiveness of gender-typing in product markets.

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