Research

We estimate how firms’ productivity shocks pass through to hourly wages, finding an average passthrough of 0.08 that is twice as large for negative shocks, consistent with labor market power.

We decompose the excess wealth of the top 0.1% into saving rates, inheritances, returns, and labor income using Norwegian administrative data, revealing distinct “New Money” and “Old Money” dynamics.

We show that firms with high monopsony power respond less to monetary policy and that the decline in labor market power since the 1980s has amplified the output effects of monetary policy.

We prove identification of labor market models with human capital acquisition, learning, and sorting, and show that differences in learning opportunities help explain low measured sorting despite high firm-worker complementarity.

We characterize Chilean income dynamics using 21 years of administrative data, finding declining inequality but rising volatility and negative skewness driven by within-job and between-employer earnings fluctuations.

We study the interaction between minimum wages and income taxes during rising wage inequality and show that their correlation is tied to skill premia, rationalized by a model with private productivity information.

We show that the skewness of firm-level growth rates is robustly procyclical across the U.S. and 52 countries, and argue that recessions combine negative mean, positive uncertainty, and negative skewness shocks.

We disentangle returns to scale from TFP across firms and show that larger firms operate more scalable—but not necessarily more productive—technologies, amplifying efficiency losses from financial frictions.

We show that U.S. worker income volatility has been stable or declining since the 1950s—contradicting survey-based beliefs—and link this trend to declining firm-side volatility.

We develop a framework for how firm productivity impacts wages under imperfect competition, finding that labor market power and adjustment costs reduce passthrough and lower wage volatility by 77%.