Research
Labor markets, families, well-being, and the policies that shape them.
AI & the Economy
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What's There to Fear in a World with Transformative AI? With the Right Policy, Nothing.
The Economics of Artificial General Intelligence (forthcoming) · 2025
An essay on what a post-artificial-general-intelligence world could mean for workers, markets, and the meaning of work — what to worry about, what not to, and which policy levers still matter when machines can do most cognitive labor.
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Artificial Intelligence, Income, Employment, and Meaning
In Agrawal, Gans & Goldfarb (eds.), The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: An Agenda, University of Chicago Press · 2019
This chapter considers the effects of AI on labor markets through three channels: the distribution of income, the level and composition of employment, and — perhaps most importantly — the meaning people derive from work. AI will change who earns what, whether people work, and what work means; good policy will need to grapple with all three.
Labor & Work
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Shift or Shock? Long-term Balance of Power in Labor Markets
with Diane Swonk, Michael Horrigan · Business Economics · 2023
The pandemic-era U.S. labor market saw the fastest wage growth in a generation and the strongest bargaining position for workers in decades. We ask whether this is a transitory shock that will unwind or a durable shift in the balance of power between workers and firms — and what signals to watch.
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Comments on: Maximum Employment and the Participation Cycle
Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City · 2021
Commentary on Ayşegül Şahin's paper at Jackson Hole: how to think about maximum employment when labor force participation is moving cyclically and trend participation is shifting for demographic and caregiving reasons.
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Beyond the Classroom: Using Title IX to Measure the Return to High School Sports
Review of Economics and Statistics · 2010
Male high school athletes outperform non-athletes on educational attainment, employment, and wages, but self-selection may explain the gap. I use Title IX — which forced a rapid increase in girls' athletic participation between 1972 and 1978 — as a quasi-experiment. A 10-percentage-point rise in state-level female sports participation generates a 1-point increase in female college attendance, a 1–2-point rise in female labor force participation, and greater female participation in previously male-dominated high-skill occupations.
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Inaccurate Age and Sex Data in the Census PUMS Files: Evidence and Implications
with J. Trent Alexander, Michael Davern · Public Opinion Quarterly · 2010
We document errors in age and sex data in Census PUMS files that systematically affect estimates drawn from the 2000 Census and the American Community Survey. The errors meaningfully change conclusions in published research on earnings, employment, and family structure.
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The Internet and Job Search
In Autor (ed.), Labor Market Intermediation, University of Chicago Press · 2009
Examines how the spread of online job search has affected the efficiency of labor market matching — with implications for search duration, worker mobility, and the returns to skill.
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Title IX and the Evolution of High School Sports
Contemporary Economic Policy · 2007
The passage of Title IX in 1972 expanded high school athletic opportunities to girls, revolutionizing mass sports participation in the United States. This paper (Lead Article) analyzes high school athletic participation and how offerings for boys and girls changed in the decades after passage. Girls' participation rose dramatically following enactment and subsequent enforcement enhancements, though a substantial gender gap remains and is larger in states with lower average education and less progressive attitudes toward women's rights.
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Health Insurance Coverage of People in the Ten Years before Medicare Eligibility
with Katherine Swartz · In Peter Budetti et al. (eds.), Ensuring Health and Income Security for an Aging Workforce. W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. · 2001
Early-career chapter documenting patterns of health insurance coverage among workers in the decade before Medicare eligibility, with implications for policies targeting older workers between employer-sponsored coverage and federal insurance.
Family & Caregiving
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JEL Book Review: Career and Family — Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity by Claudia Goldin
Journal of Economic Literature · 2024
A review of Claudia Goldin's Career and Family, tracing the five generations of American college-educated women from the early 20th century to the present. Goldin's 'greedy work' framework — jobs that reward disproportionate hours with more than disproportionate pay — is a powerful lens on the remaining gender gap.
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Trends in Marital Stability
with Justin Wolfers · In Cohen & Wright (eds.), Research Handbook on the Economics of Family Law, Edward Elgar · 2011
Reconciling apparently conflicting evidence on divorce trends, we show that data from several sources consistently point to increasing marital stability among those married since the mid-to-late 1970s.
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Women's Education and Family Behavior: Trends in Marriage, Divorce and Fertility
with Adam Isen · In Shoven (ed.), Demography and the Economy, University of Chicago Press · 2011
College-educated women used to be the least likely to marry and have children; that pattern has reversed. This chapter documents how marital and fertility patterns have changed along racial and educational lines — marriage is later, fertility is lower, and happiness in marriage is higher for more-educated women, who are now also the least likely to divorce.
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Divorce Law and Women's Labor Supply
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies · 2008
Divorce law changes in the 1970s affected marital formation, dissolution, and bargaining within marriage. Earlier work suggested that the employment effects of unilateral divorce depended on property-division laws; I show those results are not robust. I find instead that unilateral divorce led to an increase in both married and unmarried female labor force participation, regardless of the pre-existing property-division regime.
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The Evolution of the American Family: An Economic Interpretation
American Journal of Family Law · 2008
A historical overview, from an economist's perspective, of how the American family has evolved in response to changes in wages, home-production technology, fertility control, and legal institutions.
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The Impact of Divorce Laws on Marriage-Specific Capital
Journal of Labor Economics · 2007
This article considers how divorce law alters the incentives for couples to invest in their marriage, focusing on the impact of unilateral divorce laws on investments in new marriages. Differences across states between 1970 and 1980 provide useful quasi-experimental variation. I find that adoption of unilateral divorce, regardless of the prevailing property-division laws, reduces investment in most types of marriage-specific capital — spouse's education, children, and household specialization — except home ownership, where the effect depends on property-division rules.
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Marriage and Divorce: Changes and Their Driving Forces
with Justin Wolfers · Journal of Economic Perspectives · 2007
We document marriage and divorce behavior over the past 150 years, comparing trends across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates rose over the last century and a half, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates are also falling, but more strikingly, the role of marriage at different points in the life cycle has changed. We discuss the driving forces behind these changes — including the pill, shifts in wage structure, home production technologies, and the emergence of the internet as a matching technology — and what they imply for family policy.
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Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress
with Justin Wolfers · Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2006
Changes in divorce law over the past thirty years have significantly increased access to divorce. Using the differential timing of divorce law reform across states as a quasi-experiment, we find a large, statistically significant decline in the number of women committing suicide following the introduction of unilateral divorce, along with declines in domestic violence and in the rate of women murdered by their partners. The evidence suggests that legal institutions have profound real effects on outcomes within families.
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Empirical Essays on Women and Families
Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University · 2001
Stevenson's Harvard PhD dissertation, advised by Lawrence Katz, Claudia Goldin, and Caroline Hoxby. The chapters laid the groundwork for her subsequent body of work on divorce law, marriage, and women's labor market outcomes.
Happiness & Well-Being
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Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?
with Justin Wolfers · American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings · 2013
Many claim that there is a satiation point beyond which more income stops buying more happiness. We revisit the question using richer data and more flexible functional forms. The well-being–income relationship is approximately log-linear and we find no evidence of satiation: well-being continues to rise with income even at very high levels.
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The New Stylized Facts About Income and Subjective Well-Being
with Daniel W. Sacks, Justin Wolfers · Emotion · 2012
We synthesize findings from our own work and the broader literature on income and subjective well-being. Three stylized facts emerge: rich people are happier than poor people within countries, rich countries have higher average well-being than poor countries, and as countries grow richer, average well-being rises. None of these relationships show evidence of satiation.
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Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress
with Justin Wolfers · Journal of Legal Studies · 2012
We examine trends in objective economic and social indicators (income, education, employment) alongside subjective well-being for black and white Americans. The black-white happiness gap has narrowed substantially since the 1970s, a convergence that tracks objective progress but suggests that subjective measures capture dimensions of racial progress that objective indicators miss.
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The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness
with Justin Wolfers · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy · 2009
By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. This decline has eroded a previously large gender gap in happiness, and is found across demographic groups and developed countries.
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Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox
with Justin Wolfers · Brookings Papers on Economic Activity · 2008
The Easterlin paradox claims that economic growth does not translate into greater happiness at the country level, even though richer individuals within a country report higher well-being than poorer ones. Using multiple datasets covering a broad sample of rich and poor nations, we find a clear positive link between subjective well-being and GDP per capita, both across countries and over time. The apparent paradox dissolves once the data are examined carefully. [Lead Article.]
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Happiness Inequality in the United States
with Justin Wolfers · Journal of Legal Studies · 2008
Using repeated cross-sections of subjective well-being data, we document a substantial decline in happiness inequality in the United States since the 1970s. Two-thirds of the black-white happiness gap has eroded, as has the happiness gap between men and women (with women becoming less happy on average). The net effect is that inequality in happiness has fallen even as income inequality has risen.
Policy
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When Democracy Falters: A Multidisciplinary, Multibook Review Essay on Polarization, Populism, and Authoritarianism
Journal of Economic Literature · 2025
A review essay surveying recent work across economics, political science, and history on democratic erosion — the structural conditions under which polarization becomes populism and populism becomes authoritarianism, and what economists can and cannot say about the path back.
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Sparking Student Curiosity
Journal of Economic Education · 2022
A reflection on the craft of teaching introductory economics — how to spark curiosity rather than march students through canonical diagrams, and how the discipline can connect to the decisions students are actually making in their lives.
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Representations of Men and Women in Introductory Economics Textbooks
with Hanna Zlotnik · AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2018
We document how men and women are represented in leading introductory economics textbooks. Women are substantially underrepresented as main characters, experts, business leaders, and policy makers, and overrepresented in domestic and food/fashion contexts. These patterns likely shape how students see the discipline and who belongs in it.
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Trust in Public Institutions over the Business Cycle
with Justin Wolfers · American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings · 2011
We document that trust in public institutions — particularly in banks, business, and government — has declined in recent years. U.S. time-series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the procyclical nature of institutional trust. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear legacy of the Great Recession: countries with the largest unemployment increases suffered the biggest declines in confidence, especially in government and the financial sector.