Labor market dynamics and wage inequality

Labor market economics examines how wages are set, how employment is distributed across skill levels, and why pay gaps persist between workers who differ by education, gender, or occupation. Over the past few decades, technological change has reshaped demand for different kinds of work, contributing to job polarization—the simultaneous growth of high-skill and low-skill employment at the expense of middle-skill jobs—and fueling debate over whether automation and digitization are the primary drivers of rising wage inequality. Researchers continue to disagree on how much of the remaining gap between workers is explained by measurable factors like credentials and experience versus harder-to-quantify ones like personality traits, bargaining power, or discrimination. Active work in the area focuses on how minimum wage policy interacts with these structural shifts, and on disentangling the labor market consequences of unemployment spells from the underlying characteristics of workers who experience them.

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90,607

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1,266,305

Keywords

Labor MarketTechnological ChangeWage InequalityEducationUnemploymentSkill-Biased