This article uses labor force surveys from 160 countries to build a new microdatabase on hours worked covering 97% of the world population in cross section. We also construct time series spanning over 20 years in 86 countries. Hours worked per adult slightly decline with GDP per capita but are weakly correlated with development overall. Hours worked by the young (aged 15–19) and elderly (aged 60+) fall with development, driven entirely by growing school attendance and public pension coverage. Hours worked among prime-age adults (aged 20–59) are stable with development but undergo a great gender reshuffling: falling hours per male worker have been exactly offset by increases in female labor force participation in many countries. Labor income taxes are strongly negatively related to hours worked across countries. This correlation is attenuated when controlling for social spending and disappears when further controlling for working hours regulations. Both social spending and working hours regulations are associated with lower hours worked

We introduce and validate a novel approach to identifying good managers. In a preregistered lab experiment, we causally identify managerial contributions by randomly assigning managers to teams and controlling for individual skill. We find that manager contributions are crucial for team success, and that people who self-select into management roles perform worse than randomly assigned managers. Managerial performance is strongly predicted by economic decision-making skill but not by demographic characteristics. Two validation studies support our experimental results. Participants who succeed in the lab receive more real-world promotions and, in a separate study of retail store managers, skill measures strongly predict store sales. A one standard deviation increase in manager quality increases annual per store sales by US$4.1 million (25% increase). Selecting managers on skills rather than demographic characteristics or the desire to lead could substantially improve organizational performance.

We study technology sophistication using a novel approach that measures the sophistication of the most advanced (MAX) and the most widely used (MOST) technologies in key business functions within establishments. Using data from over 21,000 establishments across 15 countries, we find that establishments generally underutilize the most sophisticated technologies available in a business function. These MAX-MOST gaps are persistent and strongly associated with productivity both across establishments and countries. At the establishment level, there is substantial variation in both MAX and MOST, with MOST showing a more skewed distribution. MAX and MOST follow different life cycle patterns in low-income countries and among small establishments, and they exhibit different associations with several establishment characteristics and performance indicators. This evidence underscores the different nature of the technology upgrading processes that drive MAX and MOST.

We argue that the Democratic Party’s evolution on economic policy helps explain partisan realignment by education. First, we document that educated Americans differentially oppose “predistribution” (e.g., job guarantees, higher minimum wages, protectionism, and stronger unions), while the educational gradient for redistribution (taxes and transfers) is close to zero. These relationships have been largely unchanged since the 1940s. Second, focusing on politicians and donors as key party actors, we show that the Democratic Party has moved away from predistribution since the 1970s. The number of predistribution bills introduced by Democratic House Speakers has declined by half since the 1970s. Unions—the traditional lobbying force for predistribution—see their share of Democratic Party PAC donations decline from 90% to 40% from 1968 to 1980, following 1970s legislation that facilitated corporate PAC donations. From 1980 onward, the Democrats rely increasingly on individual contributions from educated donors relative to the Republicans. We show the increased reliance on corporate PACs and educated donors is driven by the rise of a self-described “New Democrat’’ faction particularly conservative on predistribution and social issues. Finally, we trace the reaction of voters to these changes in the Democratic Party. Less-educated Americans begin to leave the party in the 1970s, after decades of serving as its base. We also show that in the crucial transition period of the 1970s through 1990s, New Democrat candidates outperform other Democrats among more-educated voters in both survey questions and actual Congressional elections. As the New Democrats are more socially conservative than other Democrats, their success with educated voters suggests that social issues alone cannot explain educational realignment.

This article examines how the American Medical Association (AMA) helped shape the development of the U.S. health insurance system in the critical period after World War II. Working with the political public relations firm Campaigns, Inc., the AMA launched a nationwide campaign to weaken support for national health insurance by framing it as “socialized medicine,” while simultaneously enrolling people in private health insurance plans to shift demand away from a public alternative. Drawing on newly assembled archival data, we find that greater exposure to the campaign explains about 20% of the rise in private health insurance enrollment and a comparable decline in public support for a national program. The campaign also appears to have influenced policy making through coordinated messaging, resolutions passed by civic organizations, congressional rhetoric, and political donations. These findings suggest that the rise of private health insurance in the United States was not solely due to macroeconomic forces or collective bargaining; rather, it was also enabled by a strategic, interest group–financed effort to shape citizen views and influence policy

We study rainmaking as an instrumental religious belief. We present a model in which a religious leader tries to persuade people to believe. Praying for rain can persuade only where the hazard of rainfall during a dry spell is increasing over time, so that prayer is most likely to succeed when people most want rain. We present evidence from prayers for rain in Murcia, Spain, where the hazard rate is increasing, that the church’s prayers for rain predict rainfall over two centuries. To generalize this finding, we gather an original data set of whether ethnic groups around the world traditionally prayed for rain. We find that ethnic groups facing an increasing rainfall hazard are 47% more likely to pray for rain, consistent with our model’s prediction that societies are more likely to pray for rain where prayer is persuasive.

Theory predicts that outsourcing public services to the private sector can reduce costs and improve efficiency but can also induce cost-cutting and compromise quality. We assess the Brazilian Organizações Sociais de Saude model (OSS), which outsources management of public hospital services to the private sector while the state remains the residual claimant. We show that this enhances hospital production and operational efficiency without adverse effects on hospital quality and equity. Increased inpatient production addresses previously unmet demand, expanding local access to hospital care and reducing population mortality. Performance gains arise from improved operational efficiency achieved through increased hospital management capacity. This facilitates staffing adjustments, favoring higher-skilled personnel, dismissing lower-productivity staff, and adopting flexible, performance-tied employment contracts. Effects are larger among private organizations with more management experience, underscoring returns to managerial capacity. Our findings show that incentive-ownership structures can address the quantity-quality trade-off in public service delivery, even when contracts are incomplete and quality is hard to measure.

How does proximity to coworkers affect training and productivity? We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm from 2019 to 2024, leveraging two shocks to proximity: the office closures in 2020 and the subsequent return-to-office mandates in 2022 and 2023. In both cases, co-located teams experienced bigger changes in proximity than distributed ones, facilitating difference-in-differences designs. We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a trade-off: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near teammates. In national U.S. data, we find evidence that the rise of remote work has had scarring effects on young college graduates. In remotable jobs, young graduates’ unemployment rate increased relative to older graduates’ post-pandemic (2022–2024) compared to pre-pandemic (2017–2019), a pattern we do not observe in non-remotable jobs

We test for stereotyping—the exaggeration of representative traits—in a high-stakes economic environment. Using surveys administered among undergraduates at the Ohio State University as well as large-scale nationally representative data, we measure how U.S. first-year students perceive the relationship between college majors and occupations. We show that students greatly overestimate the likelihood that majors lead to their representative jobs (e.g., counselor for psychology, journalist for journalism). Using an implicit association test, we show that students associate majors with their representative careers and that these associations strongly predict belief biases, in line with a stereotyping mechanism. A simple equilibrium model of the labor market predicts that stereotyping reduces welfare by increasing misallocation, which we corroborate with correlational evidence on job/major mismatch. In a field experiment, we test a light-touch policy to reduce stereotyping and find significant effects on students’ intentions about what to study as well as the classes and majors they enroll in.

Since 1967, all French firms with more than 100 employees have been required to share a fraction of their excess profits with their employees. Through this scheme, firms with excess profits distribute, on average, 10.5% of their pretax income to workers. In 1990, the eligibility threshold was reduced to 50 employees. We exploit this regulatory change to identify the effects of mandated profit-sharing on firms and their employees. The cost of mandated profit-sharing for firms is evident in the significant bunching at the 100-employee threshold observed prior to the reform, which completely disappears post-reform. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that at the firm level, mandated profit-sharing (i) increases the labor share by 1.8 percentage points, (ii) reduces the profit share by 1.4 percentage points, and (iii) has small to nonexistent effects on investment and productivity. At the employee level, mandated profit-sharing increases lower-skilled workers’ total compensation and leaves high-skilled workers’ total compensation unchanged. Overall, mandated profit-sharing redistributes excess profits to lower-skilled workers in the firm without generating significant distortions or productivity effects.