Because minorities typically fare poorly on standardized tests, job testing is thought to pose an equality-efficiency trade-off: testing improves selection but reduces minority hiring. We develop a conceptual framework to assess when this trade-off is likely to apply and evaluate the evidence for such a trade-off using hiring and productivity data from a national retail firm whose 1,363 stores switched from informal to test-based worker screening over the course of one year. We document that testing yielded more productive hires at this firm—raising mean and median tenure by 10% or more. Consistent with prior research, minorities performed worse on the test. Yet, testing had no measurable impact on minority hiring, and productivity gains were uniformly large among minority and nonminority hires. These results suggest that job testing raised the precision of screening without introducing additional negative information about minority applicants, most plausibly because both the job test and the informal screen that preceded it were unbiased.

Financial aid from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (STBF) provides comprehensive support to a student population similar to that served by a host of state aid programs. In conjunction with STBF, we randomly assigned aid awards to thousands of Nebraska high school graduates from low-income, minority, and first-generation college households. Randomly assigned STBF awards boost bachelor’s (BA) degree completion for students targeting four-year schools by about 8 points. Degree gains are concentrated among four-year college applicants who would otherwise have been unlikely to pursue a four-year program. Degree effects are mediated by award-induced increases in credits earned toward a BA in the first year of college. The extent of initial four-year college engagement explains differences in impact by target campus and across covariate subgroups. The projected lifetime earnings effect of awards exceeds marginal educational spending for all of the subgroups examined in the study. Projected earnings gains exceed funder costs for urban students and for students with relatively weak academic preparation.

We answer three core questions about the hypothesized role of newly emerging job categories (“new work”) in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand: what is the substantive content of new work, where does it come from, and what effect does it have on labor demand? We construct a novel database spanning eight decades of new job titles linked to U.S. Census microdata and to patent-based measures of occupations’ exposure to labor-augmenting and labor-automating innovations. The majority of current employment is in new job specialties introduced since 1940, but the locus of new-work creation has shifted from middle-paid production and clerical occupations over 1940–1980 to high-paid professional occupations and secondarily to low-paid services since 1980. New work emerges in response to technological innovations that complement the outputs of occupations and demand shocks that raise occupational demand. Innovations that automate tasks or reduce occupational demand slow new-work emergence. Although the flow of augmentation and automation innovations is positively correlated across occupations, the former boosts occupational labor demand while the latter depresses it. The demand-eroding effects of automation innovations have intensified in the past four decades while the demand-increasing effects of augmentation innovations have not.

We analyze the effect of exposure to international trade on earnings and employment of U.S. workers from 1992 through 2007 by exploiting industry shocks to import competition stemming from China’s spectacular rise as a manufacturing exporter paired with longitudinal data on individual earnings by employer spanning close to two decades. Individuals who in 1991 worked in manufacturing industries that experienced high subsequent import growth garner lower cumulative earnings, face elevated risk of obtaining public disability benefits, and spend less time working for their initial employers, less time in their initial two-digit manufacturing industries, and more time working elsewhere in manufacturing and outside of manufacturing. Earnings losses are larger for individuals with low initial wages, low initial tenure, and low attachment to the labor force. Low-wage workers churn primarily among manufacturing sectors, where they are repeatedly exposed to subsequent trade shocks. High-wage workers are better able to move across employers with minimal earnings losses and are more likely to move out of manufacturing conditional on separation. These findings reveal that import shocks impose substantial labor adjustment costs that are highly unevenly distributed across workers according to their skill levels and conditions of employment in the pre-shock period.

The fall of labor’s share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments typically rely on industry or macro data, obscuring heterogeneity among firms. In this article, we analyze micro panel data from the U.S. Economic Census since 1982 and document empirical patterns to assess a new interpretation of the fall in the labor share based on the rise of “superstar firms.” If globalization or technological changes push sales toward the most productive firms in each industry, product market concentration will rise as industries become increasingly dominated by superstar firms, which have high markups and a low labor share of value added. We empirically assess seven predictions of this hypothesis: (i) industry sales will increasingly concentrate in a small number of firms; (ii) industries where concentration rises most will have the largest declines in the labor share; (iii) the fall in the labor share will be driven largely by reallocation rather than a fall in the unweighted mean labor share across all firms; (iv) the between-firm reallocation component of the fall in the labor share will be greatest in the sectors with the largest increases in market concentration; (v) the industries that are becoming more concentrated will exhibit faster growth of productivity; (vi) the aggregate markup will rise more than the typical firm’s markup; and (vii) these patterns should be observed not only in U.S. firms but also internationally. We find support for all of these predictions.