In this study, we analyze the impacts of minimum wages on firms’ robot adoption using novel panel data related to robots imported by firms in China from 2001 to 2012, a period when most of China’s robots are imported. We find that minimum wages raise firms’ robot adoption significantly. The effects of minimum wages on robot adoption are larger for firms in routine-intensive industries, for firms in labor-intensive industries, and for large firms. Employing robots significantly increases firms’ value added, labor employment, labor productivity, total factor productivity, and average wages. The firm-level production function estimations show that on average, one robot replaces about 15 workers in China.

This chapter analyzes the implications of the unexpected 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic for work and retirement in the U.S. The pandemic induced the greatest loss of jobs in the shortest period of time in U.S. history. A slow economic recovery would surely have endangered work longer/retire later policies that seek to adjust the finances of Social Security retirement to an aging population. Boosted by the huge CARES (March 2020) and ARPA (April 2021) rescue packages, the early recovery from the COVID-19 recession was faster and stronger than the recovery from the 2007-2009 Great Recession. Even so, the pandemic greatly altered the job market, with workers suffering from long COVID having difficulty returning to work and more workers working from home. In its immediate effect and potential long-run impact, the pandemic recession/recovery is a wake-up call to the danger that shocks from the natural world pose to work and retirement. Realistic planning for the future of work and retirement should go beyond analyzing socioeconomic trends to analyzing expected unexpected changes from the natural world as well.

Scientific novelty drives the efforts to invent new vaccines and solutions during the pandemic. First-time collaboration and international collaboration are two pivotal channels to expand teams' search activities for a broader scope of resources required to address the global challenge, which might facilitate the generation of novel ideas. Our analysis of 98,981 coronavirus papers suggests that scientific novelty measured by the BioBERT model that is pretrained on 29 million PubMed articles, and first-time collaboration increased after the outbreak of COVID-19, and international collaboration witnessed a sudden decrease. During COVID-19, papers with more first-time collaboration were found to be more novel and international collaboration did not hamper novelty as it had done in the normal periods. The findings suggest the necessity of reaching out for distant resources and the importance of maintaining a collaborative scientific community beyond nationalism during a pandemic.

Most firms organise production around teams comprised of workers with varying abilities, and compensate workers according to their own or their team’s output. But little is known about how team members with different abilities respond to compensation thresholds, and analyses of teams in business settings typically focus on top performers. This column compares lower-ability participants in an experiment conducted among university students in China. Participants assigned to equal-sharing compensation schemes were more productive than those assigned to winner-takes-all, suggesting that organisations should consider how lower-ability workers respond to shared rewards.

Firms hire workers to undertake tasks and activities associated with particular occupations, which makes occupa-
tions a fundamental unit in economic analyses of the labor market. Using a unique dataset on pay in identically
defined occupations in developing and advanced countries, we find that in most countries occupational skill pre-
mia narrowed substantially from the 1950s to the 1980s, then widened through the 2000s, creating a U-shaped
pattern of change. The narrowing was due in part to the huge worldwide increase in the supply of educated
workers. The subsequent widening was due in part to the weakening of trade unions and a shift in demand to
more skilled workers associated with rising trade. The data indicate that supply, demand, and institutional forces
are all drivers of occupational skill premia, ruling out simple single factor explanations of change. The paper
concludes with a call for improving the collection of occupational wage data to understand future changes in the
world of work.

This chapter analyzes the implications of the unexpected 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic for work and retirement in the U.S.  The pandemic induced the greatest loss of jobs in the shortest period of time in U.S. history.  A slow economic recovery would surely have endangered work longer/retire later policies that seek to adjust the finances of Social Security retirement to an aging population.  Boosted by the huge CARES (March 2020) and ARPA (April 2021) rescue packages, the early recovery from the COVID-19 recession was faster and stronger than the recovery from the 2007-2009 Great Recession.  Even so, the pandemic greatly altered the job market, with workers suffering from long COVID having difficulty returning to work and more workers working from home.  In its immediate effect and potential long-run impact, the pandemic recession/recovery is a wake-up call to the danger that shocks from the natural world pose to work and retirement.  Realistic planning for the future of work and retirement should go beyond analyzing socioeconomic trends to analyzing expected unexpected changes from the natural world as well.

Software represents a major and fast-growing share of firms’ capital investment, impacting demand for labor and what workers do on their jobs. Using U.S. Census Bureau panel data that link firms and workers, this paper estimates the effect of firm software capital on the earnings of workers by age group. We extend the AKM framework to include job-spell fixed effects that account for potential correlation between the worker–firm match and employee age, as well as including time-varying firm effects that allow for a correlation between wage-enhancing productivity shocks and software investments. Within job-spell, capitalized software investment raises worker earnings. However, it does so at a rate that declines after the age of 50, to about zero beyond 65. Our data further show that software capital increases the earnings of high-wage workers relative to low-wage workers and earnings in high-wage firms relative to low-wage firms, thereby widening earnings inequality within and across firms.

Electric, autonomous vehicles promise to address technical consumption inefficiencies associated with gasoline use and reduce emissions. Potential realization of this prospect has prompted considerable interest and investment in the technology. Using publicly available data from a select market, we examine the magnitude of the envisioned benefits and the determinants of the financial payoff of investing in a tripartite innovation in motor vehicle transportation: vehicle electrification, vehicle automation, and vehicle sharing. In contrast to previous work, we document that 1) the technology’s envisioned cost effectiveness may be impeded by previously unconsidered parameters, 2) the inability to achieve cost parity with the status quo does not necessarily preclude net increases in energy consumption and emissions, 3) these increases are driven primarily by induced demand and mode switches away from pooled personal vehicles, and 4) the aforementioned externalities may be mitigated by leveraging a specific set of technological, behavioral and logistical pathways. We quantify –  for the first time – the thresholds required for each of these pathways to be effective and demonstrate that pathway stringency is largely influenced by heterogeneity in trip timing behavior. We conclude that enacting these pathways is crucial to fostering environmental stewardship absent impediments in economic mobility.  

Using a panel survey, the authors investigate how the welfare of rural-urban migrant workers in China is affected by trade union presence at the workplace. Controlling for individual fixed effects, they find the following. Relative to workers from workplaces without union presence or with inactive unions, both union-covered non-members and union members in workplaces with active unions earn higher monthly income, are more likely to have a written contract, be covered by social insurances, receive fringe benefits, express work-related grievances through official channels, feel more satisfied with their lives, and are less likely to have mental health problems.

This article presents an Agent-Based Model (ABM) that seeks to explain the concordance of sluggish growth of productivity and of real wages found in macroeconomic statistics, and the increased dispersion of firm productivity and worker earnings found in micro level statistics in advanced economies at the turn of the 21st century. It shows that a single market process unleashed by the decline of unionization can account for both the macro- and micro-economic phenomena, and that deunionization can be modeled as an endogenous outcome of competition between high wage firms seeking to raise productive capacity and low productivity firms seeking to cut wages. The model highlights the antipodal competitive dynamics between a “winner-takes-all economy” in which corporate strategies focused on cost reductions lead to divergence in productivity and wages and a “social market economy” in which competition rewards the accumulation of firm-level capabilities and worker skills with a more egalitarian wage structure.

This study examines the contribution of Chinese diaspora researchers – those born in China but working outside the country – to China's catching up in global science to become a world leader in research publications and citations. Using a novel name-based way to identify Chinese diaspora authors of scientific papers, we show that these researchers produce a large proportion of global scientific papers of high quality, gaining about twice as many citations as other papers of the same vintage. Our analysis also shows that diaspora researchers are a critical node in the co-authorship and citation networks that connect scientific discovery in China with the rest of the world. In co-authorship, diaspora researchers are over-represented on international collaborations with China-addressed authors. In citations, a paper with a diaspora author is more likely to cite China-addressed papers than a non-China addressed paper without a diaspora author; and, commensurately, China-addressed papers are more likely to cite a non-China addressed paper with a diaspora author than a non-China paper without a diaspora author. Through those pathways, diaspora research contributed to China’s 2000-2015 catch-up in science and to global science writ large, consistent with ethnic network models of knowledge transfer, and contrary to brain drain fears that the emigration of researchers harms the source country.

 

What, if anything, can the United States do to reverse the upward trend in inequality and the danger that it will lead to populist despotism or a corrupt oligarchy with laws made for the few, not for the many?

I propose two sets of policies. The first requires reforms in labor laws and regulations to better enable workers to organize and bargain collectively with employers. The second requires tax and procurement policies to encourage firms to develop employment ownership programs so that workers own some of the capital that employs them and additional policies that increase worker investments in capital more broadly. By operating on ownership of both labor and capital, the policies can modernize American economic institutions to fit the coming world of artificial intelligence (AI) robotics and avoid Madison’s Scylla and Charybdis choice between anarchy and corruption.

This paper presents an Agent-Based Model (ABM) that seeks to explain the concordance of sluggish growth of productivity and of real wages found in macro-economic statistics, and the increased dispersion of firm productivity and worker earnings found in micro level statistics in advanced economies at the turn of the 21st century. It shows that a single market process unleashed by the decline of unionization can account for both the macro and micro economic phenomena, and that deunionization can be modeled as an endogenous outcome of competition between high wage firms seeking to raise productive capacity and low productivity firms seeking to cut wages. The model highlights the antipodal competitive dynamics between a “winner-takes-all economy” in which corporate strategies focused on cost reductions lead to divergence in productivity and wages and a “social market economy” in which competition rewards the accumulation of firm-level capabilities and worker skills with a more egalitarian wage structure.

Using a panel survey, we investigate how the welfare of rural-urban migrant workers in China is affected by trade union presence at the workplace. Controlling for individual fixed- effects, we find the following. Relative to workers from workplaces without union presence or with inactive unions, both union-covered non-members and union members in workplaces with active unions earn higher monthly income, are more likely to have a written contract, be covered by social insurances, receive fringe benefits, express work-related grievances through official channels, feel more satisfied with their lives, and are less likely to have mental health problems.

In this paper, we examine how two regionally implemented environmental initiatives in China have impacted the innovation ability of Chinese-listed firms. The regional implementation of these policies, with non-policy regions serving as controls, offers researchers the perfect conditions for a natural experiment. Using research and development (R&D) expenditures and patents as a proxy for innovativeness, we compare the record of innovation of firms inside the policy zones with firms outside the policy zones. We use a Difference-In-Difference-In-Differences (DIDID) method to eliminate endogeneity and take the quality of the patents into account by incorporating sub-items. Results show only one of the regulations had a positive effect and that low quality patents account for most of the innovation. We conclude that reasonably designed environmental regulations, when implemented regionally in competitive industries, do improve Chinese firms' innovation ability in line with the Porter Hypothesis. The results help us derive some useful policy implications regarding innovation.

China-born scientists and engineers who conduct their research outside China, the diaspora researchers of our title, contributed to global science through the exceptional quantity and quality of their scientific work and through distinctive connections to China-based researchers and research. Analysis of the Scopus database of English language scientific journal articles shows that Chinese diaspora research publications are a substantial and growing proportion of global scientific publications, receive an above average number of citations per article, and are published at above average rates in high Scopus CiteScore journals. In addition, diaspora researchers helped China advance to the forefront of science through collaboration on papers with China-based researchers and through the citation network linking China-based research to research outside the country.

Recent analyses of the potential effects of advanced technology on jobs has tended to focus on possible reductions in routine cognitive white-collar jobs due to computer algorithms and in blue-collar jobs due to robots and factory automation. This paper provides a different perspective on the possible future of work by: (1) measuring changes in job attributes/tasks from 2005 to 2015, straddling the boundary between the pre-AI and AI eras; and (2) decomposing those changes via a shift-share analysis into the changes that occurred within occupations and changes in the shares of employment between occupations with different characteristics.  Our primary source of information on job characteristics over time is the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database developed by U.S. Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration.  While prior research has used O*NET data cross-sectionally, we create a new panel dataset that allows us to analyze changes over time for 170 job characteristics from four O*NET questionnaires completed consistently by workers (job incumbents) since 2003. Per our title, we find that within-occupation changes dominate, raising doubts about the ability of projections based on expected changes in the occupational composition of employment to capture the likely future of work. Indeed, our data show only weak relationships between automatability, repetitiveness, and other job attributes and changes in occupational employment. The results suggest that analysts give greater attention to within-occupation impacts of technology in assessing the future of work.