Gender wage inequality is persistent across contexts and time, with women earning less than men, even when controlling for factors such as job role, experience, and performance metrics. Recent research has highlighted that gender wage inequality does not just arise from differences in base wages, but also from additional compensation. In this article we contribute to this literature by studying gender wage inequality in a specific form of performance pay: bonus compensations, that are handed out mostly at the end of the calendar year and are based on workers’ (perceived) contributions to firms. While studies have shown that there are cross-sectional differences in the extent to which men and women receive bonuses, we do not know where these differences come from: is there within-firm inequality in the extent to which men and women receive bonuses, or do women sort into firms where bonuses are lower (or less often handed out)? We leverage unique longitudinal data from the Dutch population registers (2013-2023) that allow for tracking all workers monthly and contain administrative information on all wages and bonus payments without censoring. Our preliminary results show large gender inequality in bonus payments, even among workers with similar wages in the same firm. This inequality in bonus compensation is driven by both driven by within- and between-firm (i.e., sorting) processes.

In economics a large literature has studied sexual minorities (e.g., lesbian, gay, and bisexual people) and a smaller literature has studied gender minorities (e.g., nonbinary and transgender people). We are the first to study the employment and earnings intersections of sexual minority status with gender minority status. We link the 2023 New Zealand (NZ) Census – which asked questions about both sexual orientation and gender identity to all adults – to administrative earnings records. These data replicate patterns in the prior literature: sexual minorities earn less than similarly situated heterosexual individuals, and non-cisgender individuals earn less than comparable cisgender men. We report several new findings. First, we document a significant earnings penalty experienced by individuals whose sexual orientation is ‘not elsewhere classified’ (including people who would use the term ‘queer’). Second, we find a large ‘double disadvantage’ in employment and earnings for nonbinary people who are also sexual minorities. Third, we find that failing to control for sexual minority status masks large heterogeneity in transgender men’s earnings penalty. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for sexual minority status in the emerging economics literature on gender minorities, especially nonbinary people.

Children who grow up in poverty in the United States face a significantly higher risk of adult poverty compared to their peers in other wealthy nations. This study uses 50 years of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate whether the expansion of the American welfare state has successfully weakened this intergenerational link. I begin by distinguishing the statistical properties of the intergenerational persistence of poverty (IGPov) from conventional mobility metrics, such as rank-rank slopes and intergenerational elasticities, showing that IGPov combines material concerns (prevailing poverty rates) with fairness considerations (the relative persistence of poverty). Despite substantial policy changes and declining child poverty rates in recent decades, I document that high rates of poverty persistence in the U.S. have remained stagnant over the past half-century. Beneath that stability, however, lie diverging mobility patterns by gender and race/ethnicity. Finally, I show that the mechanisms behind intergenerational poverty differ from standard mobility measures, with employment being far more important than education in linking childhood poverty to adulthood poverty. Aside from reducing poverty rates through direct taxes and transfers, reducing differences in adulthood employment rates for those from high-poverty backgrounds relative to adults from low-poverty backgrounds is the most direct route toward reducing the intergenerational persistence of poverty.

The Means of Prediction offers a powerful vision of the future of AI: a future not shaped by technology, but by the technology’s owners. Amid a deluge of debates about technical details, new possibilities, and social problems, Kasy cuts to the core issue: Who controls AI’s objectives, and how is this control maintained? The answer lies in what he calls “the means of prediction,” or the essential resources required for building AI systems: data, computing power, expertise, and energy. As Kasy shows, in a world already defined by inequality, one of humanity’s most consequential technologies has been and will be steered by those already in power.

Against those stakes, Kasy offers an elegant framework both for understanding AI’s capabilities and for designing its public control. He makes a compelling case for democratic control over AI objectives as the answer to mounting concerns about AI’s risks and harms. The Means of Prediction is a revelation, both an expert undressing of a technology that has masqueraded as more complicated and a compelling call for public oversight of this transformative technology.

This study uses a large, nationally representative online survey in Chile comparing double list experiments – which reduce social desirability bias – with direct questions on attitudes among supervisors, co-workers, and customers toward sexual minority individuals. Respondents underreported their discomfort with gay individuals by 15-23 percentage points, with the largest bias and lowest comfort levels observed when asked about supervising gay employees. These patterns were mirrored in incentivized donation behavior: individuals who refused to donate in a lottery to LGBTQ-related nonprofits reported lower comfort levels and exhibited greater misreporting. Finally, respondents consistently underestimated the broader societal support for gay employees and co-workers.

This paper examines the causal effect of high school majors on cognitive skills. We compare students just above and below GPA admission cutoffs using a regression discontinuity design and find that fields of study at age 16 impact cognitive skills around age 18. Admission to STEM relative to non-academic programs raises both crystallized and fluid cognitive skills by about 0.05 standard deviations, while admission to business, social sciences, and humanities (BSH) relative to STEM lowers both by 0.10 standard deviations. Analyses of test components indicate that STEM programs particularly foster spatial reasoning and technical problem-solving skills.

Co-Authors: Eppie van Egeraat and Alexander Willen 

We use population-wide Norwegian administrative data to construct a multidimensional measure of dynastic social capital—elite education, occupational prestige, organizational and corporate leadership, and residence in high-price neighborhoods—and examine how it is transmitted across generations. Social capital is strongly persistent across generations and strongly predicts children’s long-run earnings and access to elite positions, even after conditioning on parental income, education, and cognitive ability. Incorporating social capital into standard mobility regressions reduces estimated income-based persistence by more than half, indicating that a substantial share of intergenerational inequality reflects inherited social positions rather than financial resources alone. The influence of social capital grows over the life cycle and has a particularly large effect on becoming a top earner. Quasi-experimental evidence from adoption placements and parental lottery wins shows that these patterns reflect environmental transmission rather than genetic inheritance or direct income effects. Together, the findings reframe intergenerational mobility as a process shaped not only by inherited resources and skills, but also by durable social positions transmitted across generations.

The share of aggregate income earned by labor has been declining in several high-income countries. This conflicts with a macroeconomic production function that is Cobb-Douglas, which was initially motivated by Kaldor's growth fact of a constant labor share. To reconcile the aggregate production function with declining labor shares and increasing capital-output ratios, some researchers have suggested that capital can easily substitute labor. This, in turn, contradicts the vast econometric evidence that suggests capital and labor are gross complements.

This paper introduces factor-biased technological change into a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function and shows how recent developments of the labor share can be reconciled with a reasonably calibrated CES when the substitution elasticity of capital and labor is low (σ ≈ 0.6). Empirically plausible calibration allows me to estimate the direction of technical change. The results suggest that all technological progress in the US over the last decades was labor-saving. This supports the idea that technological change in capital-rich countries is directed towards labor when production factors are complements.