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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
| By: | David G. Blanchflower; Alex Bryson |
| Abstract: | The worsening mental health of young workers in the United States drives the disappearance of the U-shape in wellbeing and the hump-shape in illbeing in the last decade. Illbeing declines in age among workers but is hump-shaped among non-workers across all US states. This has been the case for some time and is apparent in our analyses of two large US datasets with long time runs - the Behavioral Risk Survey System 1993-2025 and the National Health Interview Survey of 1997-2024. Although the mental health of workers and non-workers has been declining it has been deteriorating most quickly among young workers, leading to a steepening in the age gradient of mental illbeing for workers. Improvements in worker wellbeing (and declines in worker illbeing) with age are mirrored in age differences in reported working conditions in the American Job Quality Survey of 2025: six measures of job quality rise with age. Declines in mental health are most pronounced among the youngest workers ages 18-22 who are likely drawn from lower socio-economic classes and report the greatest difficulties making ends meet. |
| JEL: | I31 J28 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34696 |
| By: | Natalia Khorunzhina (Institute for Fiscal Studies); Jesse Wedewer (Duke University); Runling Wu (Duke University) |
| Date: | 2026–01–21 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:26/09 |
| By: | Li, Shurui (Department of Economics, Umeå University) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how fertility events contribute to the gender pay gap in a framework that integrates a life-cycle model with a search and matching model featuring endogenous job matching and wage bargaining. The model represents four fertility-related life-cycle stages, each of which is associated with distinct labor market behaviors and constraints. This paper highlights the role of first-birth timing, parental leave, and job amenity preferences in shaping gender gaps in human capital accumulation and career trajectories. Counterfactual simulations show that delaying the first birth and shortening parental leave substantially improve women’s trajectories of wages and promotions. Equalizing amenity preferences between genders, though not efficiency-enhancing, significantly raises women’s representation in high-paying jobs and promotes greater structural equality in the labor market. The framework provides a structural lens to assess how demographic shocks interact with search frictions and amenity preferences to produce enduring gender gaps in the labor market. |
| Keywords: | parental leave; gender gap; job amenity; human capital; search and matching |
| JEL: | D91 J13 J16 J24 J64 |
| Date: | 2026–01–19 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:umnees:1042 |
| By: | Christopher Campos (University of Chicago Booth School of Business); Pablo Muñoz (Universidad de Chile, Department of Economics); Alonso Bucarey; Dante Contreras (Universidad de Chile, Department of Economics) |
| Abstract: | 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 document substantial heterogeneity in these returns across majors and show that such variation helps explain gender gaps in labor market outcomes: women place greater weight on balancing career and family in their major choices, and these preference differences account for about 30% of the gender earnings gap among college graduates. Last, we use our causal estimates to evaluate the effects of counterfactual assignment rules that target representation gaps in settings with centralized assignment systems. We find that gender quotas in high-return fields can significantly reduce representation and earnings gaps with minimal impacts on efficiency and aggregate fertility. |
| Keywords: | preferences, returns to majors, gender gaps, centralized assignment |
| JEL: | I24 I26 J01 J16 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bfi:wpaper:2026-19 |
| By: | Winkelmann, Rainer; Zimmermann, Klaus F. |
| Abstract: | The macro evidence of increased adjustment pressure since the early seventies suggests that job mobility should have increased. Hence, retrospective and spell data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are combined in order to test the hypothesis that job stability for German workers declined between 1974 and 1994. Using count data regression models in which we control for labour market experience, various demographic factors, and occupation, we find that job stability did not decrease, but if anything increase, between 1974 and 1994. Our finding suggests that labour market inflexibility is an important factor in explaining the European unemployment problem. |
| Keywords: | Labor and Human Capital |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:canzdp:263787 |
| By: | David Autor; B. N. Kausik |
| Abstract: | A central socioeconomic concern about Artificial Intelligence is that it will lower wages by depressing the labor share - the fraction of economic output paid to labor. We show that declining labor share is more likely to raise wages. In a competitive economy with constant returns to scale, we prove that the wage-maximizing labor share depends only on the capital-to-labor ratio, implying a non-monotonic relationship between labor share and wages. When labor share exceeds this wage-maximizing level, further automation increases wages even while reducing labor's output share. Using data from the United States and eleven other industrialized countries, we estimate that labor share is too high in all twelve, implying that further automation should raise wages. Moreover, we find that falling labor share accounted for 16\% of U.S. real wage growth between 1954 and 2019. These wage gains notwithstanding, automation-driven shifts in labor share are likely to pose significant social and political challenges. |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2601.06343 |