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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
| By: | Costa-Font, Joan; Nicińska, Anna; Rosello-Roig, Melcior |
| Abstract: | We compare inequality and social mobility trends in European countries exposed to Soviet Communist (SC) regimes with those not exposed, using similar welfare measures. We draw upon a rich retrospective dataset that collects relevant welfare measures across regimes including information on living space and self-reported health, and relevant inequality and mobility indices for ordinal and categorical data. Our results suggest evidence of comparable welfare inequality trends in countries exposed to SC and those unexposed. Although individuals exposed to SC enjoyed higher levels of social mobility, differences in inequality across countries exposed to different regimes were negligible. A plausible explanation lies in the countervailing role of the welfare state in countries not exposed to SC and the inefficiency of the bureaucratic allocation of private goods aimed at reducing inequality in countries exposed to SC. |
| Keywords: | bureaucracy; education; European Communist Regimes;; health inequality; living space; self-reported health; social mobility; Soviet Communism; welfare |
| JEL: | H53 I38 N34 P20 P29 P36 P46 |
| Date: | 2026–03–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:128960 |
| By: | Bollinger, Christopher R.; Jenkins, Stephen; Rios-Avila, Fernando; Tasseva, Iva |
| Abstract: | We contribute new cross-national evidence about the nature of measurement errors in employment earnings, fitting the same error components models to harmonised earnings data for Austria and the UK. For both countries, there is evidence that administrative data contain measurement errors in addition to linkage errors, and there is no mean reversion in survey measurement errors. |
| Keywords: | measurement error; linkage error; earnings; linked survey data; administrative data; finite mixture models |
| JEL: | C81 D31 |
| Date: | 2026–03–23 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:137298 |
| By: | David Autor; Caroline Chin; Anna M. Salomons; Bryan Seegmiller |
| Abstract: | We study the role of expertise in new work–novel occupational roles that emerge as technological and economic conditions evolve–using newly available 1940 and 1950 Census Complete Count files and confidential American Community Survey data from 2011-2023. We show that new work is systematically distinct from simply more work in existing occupations in four respects. First, it attracts workers with distinct characteristics: new work is disproportionately performed by younger and more educated workers, even within detailed occupation-industry cells. Second, new work commands economically significant wage premiums that persist beyond workers' initial entry into new work, consistent with returns to scarce, specialized expertise rather than temporary market disequilibrium. Third, these premiums decline across vintages as expertise diffuses, with 'newer' new work commanding larger premiums than older new work. Fourth, the emergence of new work can be traced to specific demand shocks in particular locations and time periods, suggesting that expertise formation responds systematically to economic opportunities. These findings suggest that new work serves as a countervailing force to automation-driven job displacement not merely by creating additional employment, but also by generating new domains of human expertise that command market premiums. This expertise-based mechanism helps explain both the expanding variety of work activities across decades and the historical resilience of the labor share. |
| JEL: | E24 J11 J23 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34986 |