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Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20-64 years old, as of mid 2023, according to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. That’s about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s that we estimate in time-use data. We first explain why the big shift to work from home has endured rather than reverting to pre-pandemic levels. We then consider how work-from-home rates vary by worker age, sex, education, parental status, industry and local population density, and why it is higher in the United States than other countries. We also discuss some implications of the big shift for pay, productivity, and the pace of innovation. Over the next five years, U.S. business executives anticipate modest increases in the share of fully remote jobs at their own companies and in the share of jobs with hybrid arrangements, whereby the employee splits the workweek between home and employer premises. Other factors that portend an enduring shift to work from home include the ongoing adaptation of managerial practices and further advances in technologies, products, and tools that support remote work.

This paper quantifies the contribution of technology gaps to international income inequality. I develop an endogenous growth model where cross-country differences in R&D efficiency and cross-industry differences in innovation and adoption opportunities together determine equilibrium technology gaps, trade patterns, and income inequality. Countries with higher R&D efficiency are richer and have comparative advantage in more innovation-dependent industries. I calibrate R&D efficiency by country and innovation dependence by industry using R&D, patent, and bilateral trade data. Counterfactual analysis implies technology gaps account for one-quarter to one-third of nominal wage variation within the OECD.

We show that foreign capital liberalization reduces capital misallocation and increases aggregate productivity for affected industries in India. The staggered liberalization of access to foreign capital across disaggregated industries allows us to identify changes in firms' input wedges, overcoming major challenges in the measurement of the effects of changing misallocation. Liberalization increases capital overall. For domestic firms with initially high marginal revenue products of capital (MRPK), liberalization increases revenues by 23%, physical capital by 53%, wage bills by 28%, and reduces MRPK by 33% relative to low MRPK firms. The effects of liberalization are largest in areas with less developed local banking sectors, indicating that inefficiencies in that sector may cause misallocation. Finally, we propose an assumption under which a novel method exploiting natural experiments can be used to bound the effect of changes in misallocation on treated industries' aggregate productivity. These industries' Solow residual increases by 3–16%.

This study measures spending power inequality within age cohorts and estimates fiscal progressivity via lifetime net tax rates. We find, first, that inequality in income and especially wealth dramatically overstates inequality in spending power. Second, inequality in current spending power differs from that in lifetime spending power because of credit constraints, in-kind government benefits, and other factors. Third, the US fiscal system is highly progressive once cohorts are old enough to have highly dispersed human wealth. Fourth, households’ rankings based on current income can differ substantially from their rankings based on lifetime resources. Fifth, current-year net tax rates substantially understate fiscal progressivity.

Using a structural life-cycle model, we quantify the heterogeneous impact of school closures during the corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental characteristics. In the model, public investment through schooling is combined with parental time and resource investments in the production of child human capital at different stages in the children’s development process. We quantitatively characterise the long-term consequences from a COVID-19-induced loss of schooling, and find average losses in the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of the affected children of ⁠, as well as welfare losses equivalent to about of permanent consumption. Because of self-productivity in the human capital production function, younger children are hurt more by the school closures than older children. The negative impact of the crisis on children’s welfare is especially severe for those with parents with low educational attainment and low assets.

Can strengthening intellectual property protection for producers of one good affect innovation in other related goods? To answer this question, we exploit a unique policy experiment in the interwar military aircraft industry. Airframe designs had little intellectual property protection before 1926, but changes passed by Congress in 1926 provided airframe manufacturers with enhanced property rights over new designs. We show that granting property rights to airframe producers increased innovation in airframes, but slowed innovation in aero-engines, a complementary good where there was no change in the availability of intellectual property protection. We propose and test a simple theory that explains these patterns.

Despite the importance of fast internet connectivity in the modern economy, there are substantial inequalities in access to this technology, both across and within countries. Overcoming these inequalities – commonly referred to as the 'Digital Divide' – have been the focus of a multitude of different policies around the world. However, our knowledge of the relative effectiveness of these policies remains limited.

This research aims at identifying and documenting barriers for 'middle class' students with excellent academic results to gain entry into an undergraduate programme at an elite institution.

This paper investigates the effects of wealth taxes on wealth accumulation, combining administrative data on wealth data Denmark and a theoretical life-cycle model of wealth accumulation.

Over the last decade, socio-economic mobility has declined and the shares in employment of low- and high-paying occupations has increased. This work investigates if job polarization has been a cause of the decline in mobility in the UK.