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- April 8, 2025
- Article
Creating Workplaces Free of Forever Chemicals
By: Joseph G. Allen, Heather A. Henrikson and Michael W. Toffel
Forever chemicals are toxic and widely used in buildings and yet they remain on the rise globally with little regulation to control them. In the United States, for example, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations currently cover only forever chemicals in... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Private Equity and Workers: Modeling and Measuring Monopsony, Reallocation, and Trust
By: Kyle Herkenhoff, Josh Lerner, Gordon M. Phillips, Francisca Rebelo and Benjamin Sampson
We measure the real effects of private equity buyouts on worker outcomes by building a new
database that links transactions to matched employer-employee data in the United States. To
guide our empirical analysis, we derive testable implications from three theories in... View Details
- February 2025
- Supplement
Intenseye: Powering Workplace Health and Safety with AI (B)
By: Michael W. Toffel, Shane Greenstein and Sadika El Hariri
Intenseye used its $25 million series A funds to refine and expand its digital safety platform while refining its target markets and ideal customer profile. As the company implemented new approaches to create value for its clients, such as developing an AI-powered... View Details
Keywords: Safety Performance; Occupational Safety; Innovation; Safety; Operations; Health; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Digital Transformation; Supply Chain Management; Performance Improvement; Entrepreneurship; Product Development; Customer Relationship Management; Value Creation; Venture Capital; Growth and Development Strategy; Information Technology Industry; United States; Europe; Middle East; Turkey
- 2024
- Working Paper
Displacement or Complementarity? The Labor Market Impact of Generative AI
By: Wilbur Xinyuan Chen, Suraj Srinivasan and Saleh Zakerinia
Generative AI is poised to reshape the labor market, affecting cognitive and white-collar occupations in ways distinct from past technological revolutions. This study examines whether generative AI displaces workers or augments their jobs by analyzing labor demand and... View Details
- July, 2024
- Article
Consumer Protection in an Online World: An Analysis of Occupational Licensing
By: Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin, Bradley Larsen and Erik Brynjolfsson
We study the demand and supply implications of occupational licensing using transaction-level data from a large online platform for home improvement services. We find that demand is more responsive to a professional's reviews than to the professional's... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Demographically Biased Technological Change
By: Victor Manuel Bennett, John-Paul Ferguson, Masoomeh Kalantari and Rembrand Koning
Who gets the jobs that automation creates? A consensus has begun to emerge that said technologies complement rather than substitute for labor. However, they also shift the demand for specific types of skills and other worker competencies. Such shifts imply unequal... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Health, Human Capital Development and the Longevity of Japanese Elites Since 710
By: Tom Nicholas and Hiroshi Shimizu
We examine the lifespan of over 40,000 elites in Japan born between 710 and 1912, including samurai warriors, feudal lords, business, political, cultural, and religious leaders at the apex of the social hierarchy. Japanese elites experienced increases in lifespan about... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Value of AI Innovations
By: Wilbur Xinyuan Chen, Terrence Tianshuo Shi and Suraj Srinivasan
We study the value of AI innovations as it diffuses across general and application sectors, using the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) AI patent dataset. Investors value these innovations more than others, as AI patents exhibit a 9% value premium,... View Details
- May 2, 2024
- Article
Require Hospitals to Disclose Their Pandemic Plans Now
By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Richard J. Boxer and Ben Creo
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that U.S. hospital and health care systems were ill-prepared for the surge of patients who overwhelmed available health care resources. An overlooked resource deserves more attention: the availability of intensive care unit (ICU)... View Details
- March 2024
- Article
Do Safety Management System Standards Indicate Safer Operations? Evidence from the OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety Standard
By: Kala Viswanathan, Matthew S. Johnson and Michael W. Toffel
Problem definition: Given the enormous disruptions and costs of occupational injuries, companies and buyers are increasingly looking to voluntary occupational health and safety standards to improve worker safety. Yet because these standards only require... View Details
- February 26, 2024
- Article
Making Workplaces Safer Through Machine Learning
By: Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel
Machine learning algorithms can dramatically improve regulatory effectiveness. This short article describes the authors' scholarly work that shows how the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) could have reduced nearly twice as many occupational... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Improving Regulatory Effectiveness Through Better Targeting: Evidence from OSHA
By: Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel
We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection averted 2.4 serious injuries (9%) over the next five years.... View Details
- September–October 2023
- Article
Reskilling in the Age of AI
In the coming decades, as the pace of technological change continues to increase, millions of workers may need to be not just upskilled but reskilled—a profoundly complex societal challenge that will sometimes require workers to both acquire new skills and... View Details
- August 2023
- Article
What About the Race Between Technology and Education in the Global South? Comparing Skill-premiums in Colonial Africa and Asia
By: Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg
Historical research on the race between education and technology has focused on the West but barely touched upon ‘the rest’. A new occupational wage database for 50 African and Asian economies allows us to compare long-run patterns in skill premiums across the colonial... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Equilibrium Effects of Pay Transparency
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Bobak Pakzad-Hurson
The public discourse around pay transparency has focused on the direct effect: how workers seek
to rectify newly-disclosed pay inequities through renegotiations. The question of how wage-setting
and hiring practices of the firm respond in equilibrium has received... View Details
Keywords: Pay Transparency; Online Labor Market; Privacy; Wage Gap; Corporate Disclosure; Wages; Negotiation
- April 2023
- Article
Racial Inequality in Work Environments
By: Letian Zhang
This article explores racial stratification in work environments. Inequality scholars have long identified racial disparities in wage and occupational attainment, but workers’ careers and well-being are also shaped by elements of their work environment, including firm... View Details
- January 2023
- Article
Social Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship
By: William R. Kerr and Martin Mandorff
We study the relationship between ethnicity, occupational choice, and entrepreneurship. Immigrant groups in the United States cluster in specific business sectors. For example, Koreans are 34 times more concentrated in self-employment for dry cleaning than other... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Too Many Managers: The Strategic Use of Titles to Avoid Overtime Payments
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and N. Bugra Ozel
We find widespread evidence of firms appearing to avoid paying overtime wages by exploiting a
federal law that allows them to do so for employees termed as “managers” and paid a salary above a
pre-defined dollar threshold. We show that listings for salaried positions... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
Triadic Advocacy Work
By: Summer R. Jackson and Katherine C. Kellogg
Scholars of street-level bureaucracy and institutional research focus primarily on the relationships between advocates and their larger bureaucratic and social systems, assuming that advocates have little need to satisfy their beneficiaries. We find otherwise in our... View Details
- September–October 2022
- Article
Seeking Purity, Avoiding Pollution: Strategies for Moral Career Building
By: Erin Reid and Lakshmi Ramarajan
This study builds theory on how people construct moral careers. Analyzing interviews with 102 journalists, we show how people build moral careers by seeking jobs that allow them to fulfill both the institution’s moral obligations and their own material aims. We... View Details