Labour Economics http://lists.repec.org/mailman/listinfo/nep-lab Labour Economics 2026-05-04 College Major Choice, Payoffs, and Gender Gaps https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26024&r=&r=lab 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 non-pecuniary 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. Christopher Campos Pablo Muñoz Alonso Bucarey Dante Contreras preferences, returns to majors, gender gaps, centralized assignment 2026-01 Leave and Let Leave: Workplace Peer Effects in Fathers’ Take-up of Parental Leave https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25126&r=&r=lab Using a reform that increased parental leave generosity, we estimate workplace peer effects in leave-taking, focusing on fathers. Coworker fathers are more likely to take leave when exposed to more peer fathers affected by the reform. Effects are stronger in establishments with higher social capital and pre-reform leave use. We explain our findings showing that incumbent coworkers drive the effects, same-gender peer influences exceed cross-gender ones, the strongest peer effects run from higher- to lower-ranked occupations, and career penalties are absent for peer fathers. Peer effects extend to coworker fathers' partners, less so to coworker mothers' partners. Alessandra Casarico Edoardo Di Porto Joanna Kopinska Salvatore Lattanzio Parental leave, peer effects, career costs, female labor market participation 2025-11 Postpartum Depression and the Motherhood Penalty https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26015&r=&r=lab Using Danish administrative data linked to two independent, validated postpartum depression screenings, we study how postpartum mental health shocks shape women's labor market trajectories. Event-study estimates show no pre-birth differences in trends between depressed and non-depressed mothers, but persistent employment gaps that widen immediately after birth. Health-care utilization patterns indicate that these differences reflect acute mental health shocks rather than pre-existing trends. The penalties are concentrated among less educated mothers and those in less family-friendly jobs. Our results highlight postpartum depression as a meaningful and unequal contributor to the motherhood penalty. Sonia Bhalotra N. Meltem Daysal Louis Fréget Jonas Hirani Priyama Majumdar Mircea Trandafir Miriam Wüst Tom Zohar Postpartum depression, motherhood penalty, labor market inequality 2026-01 Parental Preferences and the Motherhood Penalty https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26101&r=&r=lab The motherhood penalty is a major source of gender inequality, yet it varies substantially across women. We exploit the random gender of the firstborn in Finnish register data to study how parental preferences for family time interact with occupational constraints to generate this heterogeneity. We document a consistent preference for daughters across education groups, reflected in fertility behavior and maternal leave duration. Despite similar preferences, long-run labor market consequences differ sharply by maternal education. Ten years after birth, university-educated mothers experience a 10% larger earnings penalty when their first child is a son, whereas less educated mothers incur a 5% larger penalty when the first child is a daughter. These differences are consistent with lower employment among non-tertiary-educated women and with job sorting into more family-friendly positions among tertiary-educated women following the birth of a firstborn daughter. Our findings show that parental preferences, mediated by education-specific labor market opportunities, generate substantial heterogeneity in the motherhood penalty. Greta Morando Lauro Carnicelli Motherhood penalty; gender inequality; parental preferences; child gender; labor-market sorting; work-family balance; education heterogeneity 2026-04 Maternity Leave Extensions and Gender Gaps: Evidence from an Online Job Platform https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:2592&r=&r=lab We investigate the unintended consequences of maternity leave extension on gender gaps in the labor market. Using millions of job applications on an online job platform and the staggered extension of maternity leave across Chinese provinces, we find that an average increase (22%) in the length of paid maternity leave led to a 3.7-percentage-point decline in positive callbacks to female applicants relative to their male counterparts, equivalent to 17% of the pre-policy mean. In response, female job seekers shifted toward jobs with 5.4% lower wages than male applicants, submitted 4.4 more job applications (20% of the pre-policy mean) and experienced 2.1 weeks (19% of the pre-policy mean) longer job search duration. We also find that government subsidies that partially cover firms' wage costs of extended maternity leave help alleviate its adverse impact on gender disparities in hiring. Hanming Fang Jiayin Hu Miao Yu Maternity Leave; Gender Gaps; Callback Rates; Search Durations 2025-11 Workplace Connections and Labor Migration https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:2577&r=&r=lab We examine how former coworkers influence migration decisions following major labor market shocks, using the quasi-experimental setting of German reunification. Displaced East German workers are more likely to move to West Germany if they have former coworkers from the German Democratic Republic already there. Migration is strategic: workers move when their labor market prospects align with those of their contacts already in the West, and those contacts have positive labor market experiences. An extended Roy model rationalizes these findings, suggesting that migration is driven by relevant, job-specific information rather than social support from contacts. Michelle Hansch Jan Sebastian Nimczik Alexandra Spitz-Oener Internal Migration, Workplace Networks 2025-09 Moving to Opportunity, Together https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26017&r=&r=lab Many couples face a trade-off between advancing one spouse's career or the other's. We study this trade-off using administrative data from Germany and Sweden. Using an event study approach, we find that when couples move across commuting zones, men's earnings increase more than women's. To distinguish between two leading explanations - men's greater potential earnings and a gender norm of prioritizing men's careers - we examine how the patterns differ when the woman has the higher potential earnings. We then estimate a model of household decision-making in which households can (and do) place more weight on the man's earnings. Seema Jayachandran Lea Nassal Matthew J. Notowidigdo Marie Paul Heather Sarsons Elin Sundberg Labor migration, tied movers, gender gap in earnings 2026-01 Reconsidering the Cost of Job Loss: Evidence from Redundancies and Mass Layoffs https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25156&r=&r=lab This paper studies the consequences of job loss. While previous literature has relied on mass layoffs and plant closures for identification, I exploit discontinuities in the likelihood of displacement generated by a last-in-first-out rule used at layoffs in Sweden. Matching data on individual layoff notifications to administrative records, I find that permanent earnings losses are only found among workers losing their job in mass layoffs, whereas workers displaced in smaller layoffs fully recover. Auxiliary analysis suggests that larger layoffs increase exposure to non-employment, prolong unemployment duration and cause workers to leave the labor force to a greater extent. Jonas Cederlöf last-in-first-out, job loss, displaced worker, mass layoff, earnings loss 2025-12 Social Mobility in Western Countries: The Role of Families, Networks, and Institutions https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26054&r=&r=lab This chapter reviews recent advances on the drivers of intergenerational persistence in education and income, with a focus on causal mechanisms shaping social mobility across OECD countries. While the descriptive literature is vast, documenting substantial correlations between parents' and children's outcomes, recent research increasingly emphasizes the underlying factors driving these patterns. We begin with a brief illustration of global variation in intergenerational mobility using harmonized cross-country data, before turning to the literature on mechanisms. We outline a general theoretical framework, which organizes the discussion around three domains: pre-market factors (e.g., early childhood investment, parenting, education systems), labor market dynamics (e.g., sorting, networks, firm heterogeneity), and post-market institutions. We review topics such as the timing and nature of parental investments, parenting styles, credit constraints, neighborhood effects, and the role of social networks in school and on the labor market. We highlight how new data and empirical designs have broadened our understanding of the drivers of intergenerational inequality and, ultimately, interventions with the potential to mitigate it. Martin Nybom Kjell G. Salvanes José V. Rodríguez Mora Intergenerational Mobility, Social networks, Neighborhoods, Labor market 2026-02 Immigrant-Native Wage Gaps and Immigration Tariffs: Examining the Case for an H-1B Visa Tax https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26072&r=&r=lab The US government in 2025 imposed a $100, 000 tax on each high-skill foreign worker entering with an H-1B work visa. The only public economic justification calculates the tax to offset an estimated wage penalty for H-1B workers relative to US natives. But this estimate suffers from substantial bias. Reexamining the same data shows that H-1B workers receive a modest wage premium relative to comparable natives, roughly 6 percent on average-inconsistent with any wage penalty-when using equivalent wage concepts and comparing workers of the same age, gender, education, and tenure, in the same occupation and local labor market. I trace most of the discrepancy to four methodological choices that inflate the prior estimate: 1) undisclosed imputation of missing data, 2) pooling of non-contemporaneous years, 3) a definition of local labor markets contradicting standard economic practice and US law, and 4) failure to consider H-1B workers' low job tenure. The remaining discrepancy arises from comparing incompatible wage concepts for H-1B versus native workers. Beyond measurement, the theory of public economics implies that a revenue-maximizing immigration tax reduces welfare relative to alternative policies, even with zero weight for immigrant welfare. Michael A. Clemens migration, migrant, immigrant, immigration, earnings, wages, taxes, tariffs, barriers, restrictions, skill, skilled, h-1b, welfare, native, citizen, college, stem, worker, foreign, labor, labour 2026-03 Expanding Paternity Leave: Effects on Beliefs, Norms, and Gender Gaps https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12614&r=&r=lab We study whether policy can shift gendered beliefs, norms, and labor market outcomes by exploiting a major expansion of earmarked paternity leave in Denmark. The reform generated large first-stage effects, substantially reallocating leave from mothers to fathers. Using a regression discontinuity design combined with new survey data linked to administrative records, we show that the reform makes parents more supportive of paternity leave, shifts gender-role beliefs in a progressive direction, and reduces perceived differences in childcare ability. The reform also narrows gender gaps in earnings and hours worked. The earnings gap falls by 34pp in the first year following childbirth (during leave) and by 2.8pp in the second year (after leave). These results demonstrate that policy can meaningfully influence beliefs, norms, and gender inequality. On the other hand, earmarking restricts families' ability to allocate leave freely and lowers leave satisfaction, highlighting a central trade-off inherent in paternalistic policies. Henrik Jacobsen Kleven Camille Landais Anne Sophie Lassen Philip Rosenbaum Herdis Steingrimsdottir Jakob Egholt Søgaard paternity leave, gender norms, gender wage gap 2026 Reconciling Estimates of the Long-Term Earnings Effect of Fertility https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26043&r=&r=lab This paper reconciles different approaches to estimating the labor market effects of children. Combining elements from event-study and instrumental-variable estimators we find that while both approaches imply a 15 percent increase in the mother-partner earnings gap ("child penalty"), they differ in what drives this gap. The standard event study attributes it primarily to reduced maternal earnings, but our results suggest maternal changes account for less than half. We show that women time fertility as their earnings profile flattens, causing the event study to overestimate the maternal penalty. This finding has broader implications for event-study designs, as pre-trends may be uninformative about selection bias. Simon Bensnes Ingrid Huitfeldt Edwin Leuven Child penalty, female labor supply, event study, instrumental variable 2026-02 Rising Inequality, Declining Mobility: The Evolution of Intergenerational Mobility in Germany https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25103&r=&r=lab This paper is the first to show that intergenerational income mobility in Germany has decreased over time. We estimate intergenerational persistence for the birth cohorts 1968-1987 and find that it rises sharply for cohorts born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, after which it stabilizes at a higher level. As a step towards understanding the mechanisms behind this increase, we show that parental income has become more important for educational outcomes of children. Moreover, we show that the increase in intergenerational persistence coincided with a surge in cross-sectional income inequality, providing novel evidence for an ``Intertemporal Great Gatsby Curve''. Julia Baarck Moritz Bode Andreas Peichl Intergenerational Mobility, Social Mobility, Income, Education, Inequality. 2025-11 Reintegrating Older Long-Term Unemployed Workers: The Impact of Temporary Job Guarantees https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25160&r=&r=lab Long-term unemployment among older workers is particularly difficult to overcome. We study the impacts of a large-scale job guarantee program that offered up to two years of fully subsidized employment to long-term unemployed individuals aged 50 and above. Using a sharp age-based discontinuity in eligibility, we find that participation increased regular, unsubsidized employment by 43 percentage points two years after the program ended. The gains are driven by transitions into new firms and industries, rather than continued subsidized employment, and we find no evidence of displacement effects for non-participants or spillovers to family members. The program had no measurable short-run health effects. Alexander Ahammer Martin Halla Pia Heckl Rudolf Winter-Ebmer Long-term unemployment, temporary job guarantee, subsidized employment, health status. 2025-12 Mitigating Mobility Frictions: The Effect of Cash-on-Hand on Labor Mobility https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26099&r=&r=lab Providing recently laid off workers with cash benefits may help them overcome mobility costs and thereby stimulate labor mobility. On the other hand, cash benefits may dampen the employment shock and reduce the incentive to move. In this paper, we test these two competing mechanisms against each other. For this we use a severance pay regulation in Austria, which generated a sharp cutoff after which workers became eligible to a severance payment of two monthly salaries. Our results indicate that this cash payment increased labor mobility by around 8% to 12%. This increase is much stronger for worker groups with lower baseline mobility rates. Rudolf Winter-Ebmer Karim Bekhtiar Unemployment, labor mobility, internal migration, commuting 2026-04 Gender Gaps Under Comparable Tasks: Evidence from Quasi-Random Assignment https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26028&r=&r=lab Gender gaps in earnings persist even among high-skilled workers, partly because men and women often perform different tasks within and across jobs. We study a rare setting in which high-skilled men and women perform the same tasks under comparable conditions, allowing us to assess gender differences in productivity and pay without confounding from task or client allocation. Using administrative data from the Swedish Public Employment Service between 2003 and 2014, we exploit a rotation scheme that quasi-randomly assigns job seekers to employment caseworkers. This ensures male and female caseworkers are matched with comparable clients. We find productivity differences are small: job seekers assigned to female and male caseworkers exit unemployment at similar rates, with no evidence of job-quality differences. Consistent with this, hourly wages-conditional on productivity-are nearly identical across genders. Despite this, female caseworkers earn about 8 percent less per year, due to differences in contracted and actual hours worked. We also find suggestive evidence that male caseworkers are more likely to be promoted than equally productive female colleagues. Overall, when tasks are standardized and performance is measured objectively, gender differences in productivity and hourly pay are minimal, while gaps in annual earnings and career progression persist. Petter Lundborg Johan Vikström Negar Khaliliaraghi Gender Gaps, Productivity, Wages, Task Allocation 2026-01 Minimum Wages, Earnings, and Worker-Firm Sorting https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26060&r=&r=lab This paper studies Thailand's 2012-2013 nationwide minimum-wage reform, which raised wage floors by over 40 percent. Using matched employer-employee data, we study its effects on earnings, employment dynamics, and worker-firm sorting. We estimate a discrete type model that jointly captures heterogeneity in wages and mobility across workers and firms. Earnings rise sharply at the bottom with spillovers well above the new minimum, while employment effects are modest and concentrated among the long-term non-employed. Simulations imply sizable gains in discounted lifetime earnings, driven mainly by higher wages but amplified by mobility changes for high-turnover workers. The reform also alters career wage profiles: entry wages increase for low- and mid-wage workers, but tenure-based wage growth flattens most for mid-wage workers, generating an intertemporal trade-off between higher starting pay and slower subsequent progression. Finally, assortative matching weakens as lower-type workers move up the firm wage ladder, yet revealed-preference measures show that wage-based upgrading does not always translate into higher-valued jobs. Suphanit Piyapromdee Tasina Tawichsri Nada Wasi Minimum wage, worker-firm sorting, job mobility, wage dynamics, matched employer- employee data, revealed preferences, lifetime earnings 2026-03 Workplace Injury Risk and the Gender Wage Gap https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26081&r=&r=lab Men experience workplace injuries at roughly twice the rate of women. We study whether compensating differentials for injury risk contribute to gender differences in firm pay policies. We develop a search model that microfounds an AKM wage equation, decomposing firm pay effects into productivity and injury-risk components. Using Italian matched employer-employee data with individual injury records, we estimate gender-specific firm wage effects and firm-level injury risk. We find that injury-related channels account for 8 percent of the gender gap in firm wage effects, rising to 17 percent in manufacturing. While women receive only 86 percent of men's wage response to firm-level injury risk, conditioning on broad occupation eliminates this within-firm disparity. This indicates that the injury channel reflects sorting across firms and occupational allocation within firms, rather than differential pricing of identical risk. Francesco Del Prato Salvatore Lattanzio Gender wage gap, workplace injuries, compensating differentials, AKM, rent sharing 2026-03 Outside Job Opportunities and the Gender Gap in Pay https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:2571&r=&r=lab We show that the wages of men and women are differentially affected by outside options, and that these differential responses contribute to the gender pay gap. We develop a simple model of on-the-job search that integrates two crucial gender differences: job preferences and the propensity to renegotiate wages in response to external offers. Both factors contribute to lower wage responsiveness for women when they receive outside offers, and a negative female-male pay gap. However, women's job mobility responses vary depending on the underlying mechanism. To empirically test our model's predictions, we analyze wage and job mobility responses of men and women to external job opportunities, mediated through family networks. Using Swedish register data, we find that improved outside options are associated with higher within-job wage growth for men but not for women. Importantly, we can rule out that these gendered responses arise from differences in the quality of external offers as these are balanced across genders by design. Additionally, men's and women's job mobility responses are very similar. In the light of the model, we attribute these findings to differences in negotiation behavior between men and women. Policies encouraging women to bargain in response to outside options may thus be a powerful tool for reducing the remaining within-job gender gap in pay. Peter Fredriksson Dogan Gülümser Lena Hensvik Gender wage gap, outside options, wage bargaining, on-the-job search 2025-09 The Effects of Immigration on Places and People - Identification and Interpretation https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:2586&r=&r=lab Most studies on the labor market effects of immigration use repeated cross-sectional data to estimate the effects of immigration on regions. This paper shows that such regional effects are composites of effects that address fundamental questions in the immigration debate but remain unidentified with repeated cross-sectional data. We provide a unifying empirical framework that decomposes the regional effects of immigration into their underlying components and show how these are identifiable from data that track workers over time. Our empirical application illustrates that such analysis yields a far more informative picture of immigration's effects on wages, employment, and occupational upgrading. Christian Dustmann Sebastian Otten Uta Schönberg Jan Stuhler Immigration, wage effects, employment effects, upgrading, elasticity, selection, identification 2025-10 The Menopause “Penalty” https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25141&r=&r=lab The motherhood penalty is well-documented, but what happens at the other end of the reproductive spectrum? Menopause-a transition often marked by debilitating physical and psychological symptoms-also entails substantial costs. Using population-wide Norwegian and Swedish data and quasi-experimental methods, we show that a menopause diagnosis leads to lasting drops in earnings and employment, alongside greater reliance on social transfers. Increasing access to menopause-related health care can help offset these losses. Our findings reveal the hidden economic toll of menopause and the potential gains from better support policies. Gabriella Conti Rita Ginja Petra Persson Barton Willage Menopause, Health, Labor Market 2025-12 How Early Career Choices Adjust to Economic Crises https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25149&r=&r=lab We study how students adjust their early career choices in response to economic crises and how these decisions affect their long-run labor market outcomes. Focusing on Sweden's deep recession in the early 1990s-which hit the manufacturing and construction sectors hardest-we first show that students whose fathers lost jobs in these sectors were more likely to choose career paths tied to less-affected industries. These students later experienced better labor market outcomes, including higher employment and earnings. Our findings suggest that informational frictions are a key obstacle to structural change and identify career choice as an important channel through which recessions reshape labor markets in the long run. Julien Grenet Hans Grönqvist Edvin Hertegård Martin Nybom Jan Stuhler High School Major; Recession; Information Frictions; Structural Change 2025-12 Unions in Developing Countries https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:2569&r=&r=lab The effects of trade unions on firm performance are theoretically ambiguous. The sizable empirical literature on their effects is almost exclusively confined to developed countries, particularly those in North America and Europe. We contribute to the literature by estimating union effects on firm performance in about 40, 000 firms in 77 developing countries between 2002 and 2011. In doing so, we exploit standardized firm level data collected by the World Bank. We find positive partial correlations between unionization and firm labor productivity and wages, especially in lower-income countries. These positive effects persist when we instrument for union presence, consistent with recent evidence of union positive effects on productivity and wages in western industrialized countries. Alex Bryson Mari Tanaka trade unions; productivity; wages; developing countries; enterprise data; union formation 2025-09 Long-Run Effects of Technological Change: The Impact of Automation on Intergenerational Mobility https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26047&r=&r=lab This paper examines how automation shapes intergenerational income mobility. Using Swedish register data on parents and children from 1985 to 2019, we study how parental exposure to robots at the occupational and industry level during the 1990s affected children's outcomes up to thirty years later. To address selection, we match parents on detailed worker, firm, and family characteristics and complement this with firm-level variation based on robot and broader automation imports. We also employ two IV strategies that leverage exogenous variation in automation adoption: one based on foreign industry-level robot adoption, and another exploiting differences in managerial education at the firm level. Our results show that parental exposure to robotization and automation reduces children's income and upward mobility, and leads to worse long-run labor market and educational outcomes. These effects are concentrated among low-income families. Evidence suggests that parental labor market shocks and financial strain are key mechanisms. Taken together, the findings indicate that technological change can reduce intergenerational mobility and contribute to long-run inequality. Martin Olsson Fredrik Heyman Intergenerational Mobility; Robots; Automation; Inequality 2026-02 Work from Home and Disability Employment https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18555&r=&r=lab There has been a dramatic rise in disability employment since the pandemic. At the same time, work from home (WFH) has risen four-fold. This paper asks whether the two are causally related. Controlling for compositional changes and labor market tightness, a 1 percentage point increase in WFH increases full-time employment by 1.0% for individuals with a physical disability. The postpandemic increase in working from home explains 68%-85% of the rise in full-time employment. Wage data suggests that WFH increased the supply of workers with a physical disability, likely by reducing commuting costs and enabling better control of working conditions. Bloom, Nicholas Dahl, Gordon Rooth, Dan-Olof work from home, disability employment 2026-04 Helping jobseekers with recommendations based on skill profiles or past experience: Evidence from a randomized intervention https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:2589&r=&r=lab Searching for jobs is challenging, and online platforms increasingly aim to improve outcomes by offering personalized job recommendations. In a randomized controlled trial with over 1, 250 participants, we evaluate recommendations based either on prior experience or on skill profiles assessed at study enrolment. We find that both types of recommendations tend to improve job finding rates. Profile-based recommendations are particularly effective for individuals with limited experience and mismatch in their previous employment. These findings highlight the importance of aligning job search advice with jobseekers' skills, especially for disadvantaged groups. Mirjam Bächli Rafael Lalive Michele Pellizzari Jobseekers, online job search, job recommendations 2025-10 Managers and the Cultural Transmission of Gender Norms https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26040&r=&r=lab This paper studies how managers' gender attitudes shape workplace culture and gender inequality. Using data from a multinational firm operating in over 100 countries, we leverage cross-country manager rotations to identify the effects of male managers' gender attitudes on gender pay gaps within a team. Managers from countries with one standard deviation more progressive gender attitudes reduce the pay gap by 5 percentage points (18%), largely through higher promotion rates for women. These effects persist after managers rotate out and are strongest in more conservative countries. Managers with progressive attitudes also influence the local office culture, as local managers who interact with but are not under the purview of the foreign manager begin to have smaller pay gaps in their teams. Our evidence points to individual managers as critical in shaping corporate culture. Virginia Minni Kieu-Trang Nguyen Heather Sarsons Carla Srebot managers, gender gaps, corporate culture, multinationals 2026-02 The Rules of the Game: Local Wage Bargaining and the Gender Pay Gap https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25128&r=&r=lab To study how local bargaining institutions affect within-job gender wage gaps, we exploit the fact that most Swedish firms tend to have one collective agreement covering all their blue-collar workers. This implies that workers performing the same tasks in different firms are covered by different types of agreements. Our results show that gender pay gaps are smaller when agreements guarantee a yearly minimum pay raise for each worker. The patterns also hold within firms as gender wage gaps in other occupations are uncorrelated with blue-collar rigidities. Bargaining constraints affect gender equality more in female-underrepresented settings and in low-productive firms. Maria Olsson Oskar Nordström Skans Collective bargaining, Gender equality, Unions 2025-11 Collective Bargaining Networks and the Propagation of Shocks https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25157&r=&r=lab How does collective bargaining shape the labor market response to economic shocks? I use novel Argentine administrative data to uncover the network of firms linked by collective bargaining and show that positive product-demand shocks to firms within a bargaining unit raise wages at other non-shocked firms in the same unit. Heterogeneous wage and employment responses indicate that propagation operates via collectively bargained wage floors. I develop and estimate a structural model where wage floors are determined in bargaining equilibrium. The model shows that the network shapes the bite of wage floors, which in turn determines the magnitude of shock propagation. Santiago Hermo collective bargaining, unions, wage floors, monopsony power, trade shocks, shock propagation, rent-sharing 2025-12 Worker Responses to Immigration Across Firms: Evidence from Colombia https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26041&r=&r=lab The labor market effects of immigration depend on how firms adjust, yet this aspect remains unexplored in developing countries. This paper studies the mass influx of Venezuelan migrants into Colombia using employer-employee data. As immigrants concentrate in informal employment, formal employment for minimum-wage natives falls, reflecting their substitutability with lower-cost informal workers. The negative effects are stronger in small formal firms, which rely more on informality. A machine learning analysis shows that firm-level factors explain more of the heterogeneity in worker-level impacts. These findings highlight that informality amplifies firms' role in shaping workers' immigration adjustments. Lukas Delgado-Prieto Immigration, Minimum wages, Formal labor markets, Causal forest 2026-02 The Distribution of the Gender Wage Gap: An Equilibrium Model https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:2593&r=&r=lab We develop an equilibrium model of the labor market to investigate the joint evolution of gender gaps in labor force participation and wages. We do this overall and by task-based occupation and skill, which allows us to study distributional effects. We structurally estimate the model using data from Mexico over a period during which women's participation increased by fifty percent. We provide new evidence that male and female labor are closer substitutes in high-paying analytical task-intensive occupations than in lower-paying manual and routine task-intensive occupations. We find that demand trends favored women, especially college-educated women. Consistent with these results, we see a widening of the gender wage gap at the lower end of the distribution, alongside a narrowing at the top. We derive own and cross-occupation wage elasticities of labor supply varying with skill, gender and time, and our counterfactual estimates demonstrate that ignoring the countervailing effects of equilibrium wage adjustments on labor supplies, as is commonly done in the literature, can be misleading. We find that increased appliance availability was the key driver of increases in the participation of unskilled women, and fertility decline a key driver for skilled women. The growth of appliances acted to widen the gender wage gap and the decline of fertility to narrow it. We also trace equilibrium impacts of growth in college attainment, which was more rapid among women, and of emigration, which was dominated by unskilled men. Sonia Bhalotra Manuel Fernández Fan Wang Female labor force participation, gender wage gap, technological change, supply-demand framework, task-based approach, wage distribution, wage inequality 2025-11 Perceptions of Race in the Labor Market https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26074&r=&r=lab Empirical studies of racial wage disparities typically rely on self-reported race and treat racial categories as fixed. This paper shows that racial classification in the labor market is produced by social perception, and that modeling this perception process is essential for measuring wage gaps. We combine two large-scale administrative data sets to construct three racial identity measures for 330, 000 workers in Brazil between 2003 and 2015: employer classification, self-identification, and an algorithmic skin-tone measure extracted from photographs. In over 20 percent of cases, self-identified and employer-ascribed race do not match, and employers disagree in their classification of the same worker. To quantify how race is constructed, we estimate a "race function" describing how employers map phenotypic cues, self-identification, local context, education, and employment histories into racial categories, showing that productivity-relevant factors shape perceptions. Holding skin tone constant, university graduates are 10 percentage points more likely to be perceived as White. Education whitens even conditional on self-declared race and within firm-by-occupation cells. Measured wage disparities differ depending on whether race is self-reported, employer-ascribed, or skin-tone based, and accounting for racial perceptions substantially changes estimated wage gaps. We show that conventional approaches overstate the role of productivity differences in explaining racial wage gaps. Pedro C. Sant'Anna Sulin Sardoschau Aiko Schmeisser Race, identity, disparity, wage gap, Brazil 2026-03 Female Promotions and the Academic Pipeline: Evidence from a Natural Experiment https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26092&r=&r=lab We study how faculty promotion decisions shape women's careers and the academic pipeline, using data from 4, 000 Spanish university departments across all disciplines. We identify exogenous variation in promotions using the random assignment of evaluators to promotion committees between 2002 and 2008: applicants whose committees included a co-author or colleague were significantly more likely to qualify for promotion. We document two main findings. First, failing to obtain tenure has asymmetrically lasting consequences for women. Those who narrowly miss tenure are 57 percentage points less likely to be tenured fifteen years later, compared to 29 percentage points for men. Second, when women do obtain tenure, the effects extend well beyond their own careers: promoting a woman to Associate Professor increases female faculty by 1.5 members after 15 years, leads to six additional female PhD graduates over the following decade, and raises the number who subsequently remain in academia and reach tenured positions. Manuel Bagues Milan Makany Giulia Vattuone Natalia Zinovyeva Academic Promotions, Women in Academia, Natural Experiment 2026-03 Adapting to Scarcity: The Role of Firms in Occupational Transitions https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26020&r=&r=lab This paper examines the circumstances under which firms facilitate occupational transitions, complementing prior work that focuses on workers' decisions. We link unemployment insurance records with application diaries and clickstream data from a recruitment platform to causally assess how candidates' occupational histories shape recruiters' hiring decisions. We find that the average candidate from a different occupation faces a 7% lower contact rate than equally qualified candidates who last worked in a recruiter's searched occupation. Using a new measure of skill overlap, we show that 60% of this penalty reflects that movers meet fewer skill requirements than incumbents. Occupational experience and qualifications further reduce the mover penalty, such that certain candidates returning to a prior occupation face no penalty at all. Finally, recruiters adapt to scarcity and contact more movers in tight occupations. Changes in firm behavior account for one-third of the increase in movers' application success in tight versus slack labor markets. Jeremias Klaeui Daniel Kopp Rafael Lalive Michael Siegenthaler occupations; occupational mobility; job requirements overlap; labor demand; labor supply; labor market tightness 2026-01 The Minimum Wage And Inequality Between Groups https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26002&r=&r=lab Using 1979-2019 Current Population Survey data, we study the effect of state and federal minimum wage policies on gender, race, and ethnic inequality. We find that minimum wages substantially reduce intergroup wage inequality at least up to the 20th wage percentile, with no evidence of adverse employment effects. We conduct counterfactual simulations of between-group inequality due to minimum wage changes since 1979. Declines in the real minimum wage in the 1980s slowed progress in narrowing between-group inequality. Relatively small changes in minimum wages during 1989-1998 and 1998-2007 meant little role for the minimum wage over those time spans. Since 2007, several states have steeply raised their minimum wages, especially raising Hispanics' relative wages, because they earn low wages and reside disproportionately in those states. Finally, we find that raising the federal minimum wage to $12/hour in 2020 dollars ($14.49 in 2025Q2 dollars) would reduce existing between-group wage gaps below the 15th percentile by 25-50%. Francine Blau Isaac Cohen Matthew Comey Lawrence Kahn Nikolai Boboshko wage inequality, minimum wage, wage differentials, gender wage gaps, race wage gaps, Hispanic-White wage gaps 2026-01 Effects of Immigrants on Non-host Regions: Evidence from the Syrian Refugees in Turkey https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25109&r=&r=lab I study how local immigration shocks impact labor markets and firms across the economy through production networks. Using Turkey's Syrian refugee crisis and firm-level trade network data, I show that firms buying from host regions demand more labor, while those selling to host regions increase sales. These spillovers depend critically on network centrality: a 1% labor supply increase in Istanbul decreases local real wages by 0.56% while increasing non-host wages by 0.38%. For non-central regions, identical shocks reduce local wages by 1% with negligible spillovers. Network position thus determines whether immigration only lowers local wages or also generates economy-wide gains. Ahmet Gulek Immigration, trade, production network 2025-11 Life-cycle effects of public childcare: Evidence on children and their parents https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26004&r=&r=lab This paper provides large-scale evidence linking the economic effects of childcare programs to social skills measured in adulthood. We examine Finland's first national public childcare program, and document that it increased parental labor supply - through retirement - while reducing the intergenerational persistence of income. Critically, we leverage Finnish Defence Forces data on the near population of males to show that effects on children's adult income are underlied by lasting effects on social skills. Further, we show that life-cycle cost-effectiveness estimates based on the assumption of constant effects after typical observation windows can considerably overestimate the net costs of public childcare. Mikko Silliman Juuso Mäkinen early childhood, social skills, parental labor supply 2026-01 The Heterogeneous Earnings Impact of Job Loss Across Workers, Establishments, and Markets https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26075&r=&r=lab Using rich Swedish administrative data, we apply causal machine learning methods to study how earnings losses after job displacement vary with observable characteristics that may be relevant for targeting policy interventions for workers. Heterogeneity in effects is as large within as across worker groups defined by age and schooling, and as large within as across establishments. A substantial portion of cross-establishment heterogeneity can be explained by industry and local labor market characteristics, suggesting a role for place- and industry-based targeting. The largest losses are concentrated among already vulnerable workers, indicating that well-designed targeting policies can improve both efficiency and equity. Susan Athey Lisa K. Simon Oskar Nordström Skans Johan Vikström Yaroslav Yakymovych Plant closures, heterogeneous effects, GRF 2026-03 Collective Bargaining, Unions, and the Wage Structure: An International Perspective https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25105&r=&r=lab In this paper, we assess the recent economics literature on collective bargaining. Despite a declining trend in the OECD in coverage and especially union membership, a large share of formal workers around the world are still covered by collective bargaining agreements. We describe the substantial institutional variation across a variety of countries, highlighting research done with modern research designs and recently available administrative datasets. We then estimate a canonical empirical model of individual-level coverage effects and selection in harmonized cross-country data across 18 advanced economies (in Europe and North America). We estimate collective bargaining coverage premia, compression, selection, and spillover coefficients in each country, and use these to document considerable heterogeneity in collective bargaining coverage effects on the wage structure. While there is a strong negative relationship between collective bargaining coverage and wage inequality across countries, substantial uncertainties remain about the underlying mechanisms. Coverage effects may operate through direct premia, selection, or spillovers onto non-covered wages, but distinguishing and quantifying these channels and how they vary across institutional contexts remains a key challenge for future research. In our data, we find that the direct effect of coverage on wages of covered workers does not explain much of the cross-country correlation between coverage and inequality. While compelling research designs often result from specific institutional variation, we also emphasize that these contextual details must be accounted for when comparing estimates across industrial relations systems. A particularly pressing need is for more compelling causal evidence on spillover effects, which could help reconcile conflicting micro and macro evidence on how collective bargaining shapes the wage distribution. Simon Jäger Suresh Naidu Benjamin Schoefer 2025-11 Knowledge Spillovers, Competition, and Individual Careers https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25080&r=&r=lab Exposure to better peers in the workplace can influence career trajectories through two opposing channels: positively, via knowledge spillovers, and negatively, through competition for advancement. We disentangle these effects by studying untrained labor market entrants and distinguishing between coworkers in the same occupation with whom they are likely to compete versus those with whom they are unlikely to compete. We find robust evidence of persistent knowledge spillovers but also identify countervailing competition effects of comparable magnitude. Both effects are more pronounced for men than for women. Thomas Cornelissen Christian Dustmann Uta Schönberg Knowledge Spillovers, Peer Effects, Competition 2025-10 Intergenerational Educational Mobility among Immigrants and Descendants in Denmark: The Role of Sample Selectivity and Data Quality https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25115&r=&r=lab This paper studies intergenerational educational mobility among immigrants and descendants in Denmark for cohorts born between 1965 and 1990. At first glance, the data suggests that immigrants experience higher mobility than native Danes, but this pattern is driven by low coverage and poor data quality of parental education information in administrative registers. Among immigrants with the most reliable data, mobility patterns closely resemble those of natives. Auxiliary analyses using representative survey data corroborate this finding. Moreover, including immigrants in population-wide mobility estimates-given their artificially high relative mobility-attenuates trends in estimated mobility, especially for cohorts born in the 1980s. Rasmus Landersø Kristian B. Karlson Educational mobility, Native-immigrant gaps, Data quality 2025-11 Occupational Heterogeneity of Child Penalty in the United States https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26036&r=&r=lab I investigate how parenthood reshapes employment patterns across occupations and how this occupational heterogeneity contributes to earning disparities. Using a novel rotating panel approach to estimating child penalties, I document that both men and women change occupations. The well-established null effect of fatherhood hides that men's employment rate decreases in some occupations like finance and increases in others like construction. Women leave most occupations but select into occupations with part-time options. These occupational changes explain 40% of the income penalty for women, most of the income penalty for men, and most of the wage penalty for both genders. Ahmet Gulek Child Penalty, Gender Inequality, Occupational Choice 2026-01 Learning to Discriminate on the Job https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25116&r=&r=lab Using administrative records from a large national US retailer, we find that managers learn to discriminate "on the job" as they hire workers of different races. We find that idiosyncratic negative and positive experiences of managers influence the race of their future hires. Early negative experiences hiring black workers yield particularly substantial and persistent declines in the manager's subsequent black hiring. Our results highlight that individual labor market experiences of employers with minority workers systematically give rise to hiring discrimination, consistent with past experiences dynamically shaping employer perceptions of worker groups. Alan Benson Louis-Pierre Lepage Labor market discrimination; managers; experience effects; racial inequality 2025-11 The Gender Wage Gap in Britain: A Meta-Analysis https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26086&r=&r=lab Ours is the first meta-analysis synthesizing results from econometric studies carried out in the UK to assess the size of the gender wage gap (GWG). Drawing on 90 primary studies published between 1974 and 2024 we assess trends in the gap and identify the substantive and methodological factors that explain variance in results across studies. Expressed relative to men's earnings, the raw GWG averages 25 log points but falls to 13 log points when adjusting for covariates. There has been convergence in the mean wages of men and women at a rate of about 0.3 percentage points per annum, most of which reflects change in the characteristics of workers and their treatment in the labour market rather than differences over time in study characteristics. There is substantial heterogeneity in the size of the GWG by year of observation, worker type and research design, although differences in the size of adjusted GWG by study design are not as large as most economists might imagine. Patrice Laroche Alex Bryson Heather Joshi David Wilkinson gender wage gap, meta-analysis, UK 2026-03 How Parenting Styles Shape Children's Lifetime Outcomes https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26023&r=&r=lab This study examines how parenting styles predict children's lifetime outcomes. Using a Swedish dataset which combines rich survey information on parenting styles with administrative records tracking children over five decades, we find that authoritarian parenting is negatively associated with children's long-term success, especially regarding their educational attainment. The results for other parenting styles are more mixed. Authoritarian parenting remains a robust predictor of adverse outcomes even when accounting for ability and family background. We identify children's knowledge accumulation and parental educational expectations as key mechanisms explaining these results. Hans Grönqvist Bart Golsteyn Thomas Dohmen Edvin Hertegård Gerard Pfann Child Rearing; Human Capital; Skill Formation 2026-01 The Effects of the Legal Minimum Working Time on Workers, Firms and the Labor Market https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26071&r=&r=lab This paper examines the effects of working time regulations on the allocation of workers and hours. I exploit a unique reform introducing a minimum workweek of 24 hours in France in 2014, affecting 15% of jobs. Drawing on administrative data and an event study design, I find a firm-level reduction in total hours worked, showing imperfect substitutability between workers and hours. The effects differ by gender: women working part-time were replaced by men working longer hours. Importantly, workers also reallocate between firms. To quantify the aggregate impact accounting for these effects, I build and estimate a search and matching model with firm and worker heterogeneity. Overall, the minimum workweek reduced employment by 1.4%, largely driven by women, and decreased total hours by 0.5%. Pauline Carry Working time regulations, Hours of work, Reallocation effects, Gender inequality 2026-03 Digitalization, Change in Skill Distance Between Occupations and Occupational Mobility https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26062&r=&r=lab Technological change affects labor markets not only by shifting labor demand across occupations, but also by reshaping the skill distances that govern workers' ability to move between jobs. This paper studies the digitalization wave of the 2010s using task data from online job postings, matched employer-employee data, and a gravity framework of occupational mobility. We show that while most occupations became more digital, skill distances converged for some occupation pairs and diverged for others, increasing mobility along some pathways and reducing it along others. Counterfactual simulations show that these frictions are meaningful and slow reallocation out of shrinking occupations. Arnaud Dupuy Morgan Raux Sara Signorelli Occupation mobility, Technological change, Matching 2026-03 In Their Own Words: What Workers Like and Dislike about their Jobs https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26026&r=&r=lab This paper provides novel evidence on the key drivers of job satisfaction. We ask individuals to describe, in their own words, what they like and dislike about their jobs. These open-ended questions allow us to capture what comes to mind most naturally. We analyze the resulting free-text responses using GPT-4 to identify and classify categories of job amenities. Our main study draws on a sample of 500 full-time U.S.-based employees aged 30 to 55. We find that flexible work arrangements, workplace relationships, and autonomy consistently rank among the most valued aspects of work, while poor workplace relationships, long work hours, and heavy workloads dominate the list of dislikes and rank above factors such as pay. Our approach offers a fresh lens on what job amenities workers are most satisfied and dissatisfied with. Michele Belot Xiaoying Liu Vaios Triantafyllou Job amenities, Large Language Models, GPT, Job satisfaction 2026-01 Early Childcare Attendance and Cognitive skills in Adolescence https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35109&r=&r=lab This paper examines the impact of early childcare on academic achievement for children in grade 5 and grade 9, based on a 2003 policy expansion that created quasi-random variation in slot availability for children aged 1–2. Starting childcare one year earlier increases math scores by 9.7% of a standard deviation (SD) in grade 9. Children whose mothers do not hold a high school diploma benefit by a significant 28% of a SD at grade 9, reducing the math achievement gap from children of higher-educated mothers by about one third. We also present evidence of strong improvements for children of immigrants. Ingvild Almås Nina Drange Costas Meghir Henrik D. Zachrisson 2026-04 Quantile Selection in the Gender Pay Gap https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26014&r=&r=lab We propose a new approach to estimate selection-corrected quantiles of the gender wage gap. Our method employs instrumental variables that explain variation in the latent variable but, conditional on the latent process, do not directly affect selection. We provide semiparametric identification of the quantile parameters without imposing parametric restrictions on the selection probability, derive the asymptotic distribution of the proposed estimator based on constrained selection probability weighting, and demonstrate how the approach applies to the Roy model of labor supply. Using German administrative data, we analyze the distribution of the gender gap in full-time earnings. We find pronounced positive selection among women at the lower end, especially those with less education, which widens the gender gap in this segment, and strong positive selection among highly educated men at the top, which narrows the gender wage gap at upper quantiles. Egshiglen Batbayar Christoph Breunig Peter Haan Boryana Ilieva C14, C31, C36, J16, J21, J31 2026-01 The Power of Proximity to Coworkers https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25164&r=&r=lab How does proximity to coworkers affect training and productivity? We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm from 2019 to 2024. We leverage two shocks to colocation: (i) the office closures in 2020 and (ii) the subsequent return-to-office mandates. In both cases, co-located teams experienced bigger changes in proximity than distributed ones, facilitating difference-in-differences designs. We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near colleagues. In national US data, we find suggestive evidence that the rise of remote work has had scarring effects on young college graduates: in remotable jobs, their unemployment rate has remained elevated relative to older graduates', a pattern not seen in non-remotable jobs. Natalia Emanuel Emma Harrington Amanda Pallais Remote work, on-the-job training, firm-specific human capital, general human capital, return to office, telecommunication, gender 2025-12 Educational Mobility Across Multiple Generations in Indonesia https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12611&r=&r=lab Standard intergenerational measures have been shown to understate the long-run persistence of socioeconomic advantages in developed countries. We study theoretically and empirically whether this pattern extends to less developed settings, using Indonesia as a case study. Using the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) and Census data, we study multigenerational correlations in education across three generations. Contrary to previous findings, we observe greater multigenerational mobility than parent-child correlations alone would suggest. We develop a theoretical framework to highlight two key factors influencing multigenerational dynamics in developing countries: (1) financial and credit constraints, and (2) cultural norms related to marital sorting. To confirm their relevance, we exploit regional variations in exposure to the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis and in marital customs. Sarah Cattan Antonio Dalla-Zuanna Jan Stuhler Po Yin Wong intergenerational mobility, multigenerational persistence, education and financial constraints, Indonesia 2026 Worker Rights in Collective Bargaining https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25113&r=&r=lab Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) specify the contractual rights of unionized workers, but their full legal content has not yet been analyzed by economists. This paper develops novel natural language methods to analyze the empirical determinants and economic value of these rights using a new collection of 30, 000 CBAs from Canada in the period 1986-2015. We parse legally binding rights (e.g., "workers shall receive...") and obligations (e.g., "the employer shall provide. ..") from contract text, and validate our measures through evaluation of clause pairs and comparison to firm surveys on HR practices. Using time varying province-level variation in labor income tax rates, we find that higher taxes increase the share of worker-rights clauses while reducing pre-tax wages in unionized firms, consistent with a substitution effect away from taxed wages toward untaxed rights. Further, an exogenous increase in the value of outside options (from a leave-one-out instrument for labor demand) increases the share of worker rights clauses in CBAs. Combining the regression estimates, we infer that a one-standard-deviation increase in worker rights is valued at about 5.7% of wages. Benjamin W. Arold Elliott Ash W. Bentley MacLeod Suresh Naidu Collective bargaining, Text as data, Labor laws, Incomplete contracts, Workplace amenities 2025-11 How Cyclical Is a Gap? Composition-Adjusted Evidence on the Gender Wage Gap https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1746&r=&r=lab We propose a simple and novel approach to estimate the cyclicality of gaps using cross-sectional data. Our method controls for composition effects in contexts in which panel data cannot be leveraged. Our method also provides useful insights for assessing common trends in difference-in-differences analyses. We illustrate the approach studying the gender wag gap (GWG) in Portugal, finding that it is generally procyclical, except at the top of the distribution. This procyclicality stems from the unexplained component of the GWG rather than from differences in observed characteristics. The results also do not support the hypothesis that GWG cyclicality is driven by discrimination. Pereira, João Ramos, Raul Martins, Pedro S. Wage decompositions, Gender gaps, Wage cyclicality, Discrimination 2026 Collective Bargaining and Monopsony: The Regulation of Noncompete Agreements in France https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18564&r=&r=lab Can collective bargaining mitigate monopsony power? This paper addresses this question by examining how the regulation of noncompete agreements for employees by collective agreements affects firm-level markdowns in the French manufacturing sector. Using a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we find that the regulation of noncompetes set by collective agreements leads to a 1.3%-2.2% reduction in markdowns on average. The effect grows over time and is more pronounced for smaller, less productive firms that pay lower wages. Studying a landmark decision of the French Supreme Court that introduced the obligation to have a compensation to consider a noncompete enforceable, we find a significant complementarity between the regulation of noncompetes at the national level (e.g., via case law) and sectoral collective bargaining. By enhancing compliance or imposing further restrictions, collective bargaining can serve as an effective tool to regulate the use of noncompete agreements. Boeri, Tito Crescioli, Tommaso Garnero, Andrea Luisetto, Lorenzo monoposony, unions, noncompetes 2026-04 Racial Inequality in the Labor Market https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25106&r=&r=lab In this chapter, we introduce a new framework for studying the evolution of racial inequality in the labor market. The framework encompasses two broad forces - distributional and positional - that affect labor market gaps by racial and ethnic identity over time. We provide long-run results on the evolution of Black-White earnings gaps, including new results for Black and White women, and we review the evidence on historical factors affecting racial gaps. We then provide new results on racial gaps among other groups in the U.S. and discuss the evidence on racial gaps outside the U.S. We then discuss the role of prejudice-based discrimination in driving racial gaps, particularly in the post-civil-rights era, a period when such discrimination has been thought to play a declining role in racial inequality. We describe forces that can amplify existing discrimination, such as monopsony and workers' perceptions of prejudice in the economy, and we discuss recent literature directly measuring discrimination through expanded audit studies and quasi-experimental variation. We conclude with a discussion of existing and new frontiers on race in the labor market, including stratification, reformulations of prejudice, and understanding the way race has shaped purportedly race-neutral institutions throughout the economy. Patrick Bayer Kerwin Charles Ellora Derenoncourt Race, labor markets, inequality 2025-11 Classrooms as Workplaces: How Student Composition Affects Teacher Health https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26050&r=&r=lab Work-related burnout and stress-related sickness absence have become increasingly prevalent, but evidence on which workplace features shape workers' mental health remains limited. Using population-level Swedish register data covering all lower- and upper-secondary teachers from 2006-2024, we show that schools serving more disadvantaged students exhibit substantially higher rates of sickness absence, particularly for stress-related diagnoses. Exploiting within teacher variation across student cohorts, we separate sorting from exposure and find that a one standard deviation increase in student disadvantage raises overall and stress-related sick leave by 3.6% and 8.7%, respectively. Survey evidence indicates that these effects operate through classroom conditions rather than workload or organizational differences. The findings establish client composition as a distinct and policy-relevant determinant of worker health in contact intensive occupations. Krzysztof Karbownik Helena Svaleryd Jonas Vlachos Xuemeng Wang student composition, teachers' health, mental health, contact-intensive occupations 2026-02 Job Mismatch and Early Career Success https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:2562&r=&r=lab How does being over- or underqualified at the beginning of a worker's career affect skill acquisition, retention, and promotion? Despite the importance of mismatch for the labor market, self-selection into jobs has made estimating these effects difficult. We overcome endogeneity concerns in the context of the US Air Force, which allocates new enlistees to over 130 different jobs based, in part, on test scores. Using these test scores, we create simulated job assignments based on factors outside of an individual's control: the available slots in upcoming training programs and the quality of other recruits entering at the same time. These factors create quasi-random variation in job assignment and hence how cognitively demanding an individual's job is relative to their own ability. We find that being overqualified for a job causes higher attrition, both during technical training and afterward when individuals are working in their assigned jobs. It also results in more behavioral problems, worse performance evaluations, and lower scores on general knowledge tests about the military taken by all workers. On the other hand, overqualification results in better performance relative to others in the same job: job-specific test scores rise both during technical training and while on the job, and these individuals are more likely to be promoted. Combined, these patterns suggest that overqualified individuals are less motivated, but still outperform others in their same job. Underqualification results in a polar opposite set of findings, suggesting these individuals are motivated to put forth more effort, but still struggle to compete when judged relative to others. Consistent with differential incentives, individuals who are overqualified are in jobs which are less valuable in terms of outside earnings potential, while the reverse is true for those who are underqualified. Julie Berry Cullen Gordon B. Dahl Richard De Thorpe Job mismatch, skill acquisition, retention, promotion 2025-09 Multidimensional Skills on LinkedIn Profiles: Measuring Human Capital and the Gender Skill Gap https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:25136&r=&r=lab We measure human capital using the self-reported skill sets of nearly 9 million U.S. college graduates from professional profiles on LinkedIn. We aggregate skill strings into 48 clusters of general, occupation-specific, and managerial skills. Multidimensional skills can account for several important labor-market patterns. First, the number and composition of skills are systematically related to measures of human-capital investment such as education and work experience. The number of skills increases with experience, and the average age-skill profile closely resembles the well-established concave age-earnings profile. Second, workers who report more skills, especially specific and managerial ones, hold higher-paid jobs. Skill differences account for more earnings variation than detailed measures of education and experience. Third, we document a sizable gender gap in skills. While women and men report nearly equal numbers of skills shortly after college graduation, women's skill count increases more slowly with age subsequently. A simple quantitative exercise shows that women's slower skill accumulation can be fully accounted for by reduced work hours associated with motherhood. The resulting gender differences in skills contribute substantially to the gender gap in job-based earnings. David Dorn Florian Schoner Moritz Seebacher Lisa Simon Ludger Woessmann skills, human capital, gender, education, experience, social media, online professional network, labor market, tasks, earnings 2025-12