The Evolution of Inequality, Heterogeneity and Uncertainty in Labor Earnings in the U.S. Economy A large empirical literature documents a rise in wage inequality in the American economy. It is silent on whether the increase in inequality is due to greater heterogeneity in the components of earnings that are predictable by agents or whether it is due to greater uncertainty faced by agents. Apply...

OBJECTIVES Most data on HIV prevalence in low-risk populations in sub-Saharan Africa are drawn from sentinel surveys of pregnant women attending antenatal clinics and are not representative of formal sector workforces. We surveyed workforces in southern Africa to determine HIV prevalence among formally employed, largely male populations. METHODS Voluntary, anonymous, unlinked seroprevalence s...

This paper studies wage determination using the first longitudinal dataset containing joblevel task information for individual workers. Novel quantitative task measures detail the amount of time spent performing People, Information, and Objects tasks at different skill levels. These measures suggest natural proxies for on-the-job human capital accumulation and provide new insights about wage de...

Throughout the industrialized world, young women outnumber young men in urban areas. This paper proposes that such a pattern may be linked to higher male incomes in urban areas. The argument is that urban areas offer skilled workers better labor markets. Assuming that there are more skilled males than females, this alone would predict a surplus of males. However, the presence of males with high...

We address the problem of acquiring reliable ratings of items such as restaurants or movies from the crowd. We propose a crowdsourcing platform that takes into consideration the workers’ skills with respect to the items being rated and assigns workers the best items to rate. Our platform focuses on acquiring ratings from skilled workers and for items that only have a few ratings. We evaluate th...

We explore the connection between social class, mobility, and voting behavior in nineteenth-century England. To avoid pitfalls associated with survey or aggregate data on behavior, we use administrative longitudinal records preceding secret ballot voters’ choices occupation. These reveal that landed gentry, farm workers, non-skilled workers white-collar voted, average, more for Conservatives, p...

Equilibrium Evaluation of Active Labor Market Programmes Enhancing Matching Effectiveness This paper evaluates counselling programmes in an equilibrium matching model where workers are heterogeneous in skill levels. Job search effort, labour demand and wages are endogenous. When wages are bargained over, raising the effectiveness of or the access to counselling programmes pushes wages upwards a...