There is a widespread belief that work is less secure than in the past, that an increasing share of workers are part of the “precariat”. It is hard to find much evidence for this in objective measures of job security, but perhaps subjective measures show different trends. This paper shows that in the US, UK, and Germany workers feel as secure as they ever have in the last thirty years. This is partly because job insecurity is very cyclical and (pre-COVID) unemployment rates very low, but there is also no clear underlying trend towards increased subjective measures of job insecurity. This conclusion seems robust to controlling for the changing mix of the labor force, and is true for specific sub-sets of workers.

Return migration is important, but how many migrants leave and who is poorly understood. This paper proposes a new method for estimating return migration rates using aggregated repeated cross-sectional data, treating the number of migrants in a group who arrived in a particular year as an unobserved fixed effect, and the observed number (including, importantly, observed zeroes) in the arrival or subsequent years as observations from a Poisson distribution. Compared to existing methods, this allows us to estimate return rates for many more migrant groups, allowing more in-depth analysis of the factors that influence return migration rates. We apply this method to US data and find a decreasing hazard, with most returns occurring by 10 years after arrival when about 15% of migrants have left. The return rate is significantly lower for women, those who arrive at a young age, those from poorer, less democratic countries, and is higher for those on non-immigrant visas for work or study.

Although work experience has been found to be a key determinant of work and wages for educated women, it has found to play a smaller role for less educated men and women. Instead, welfare, tax credits, and family composition are more important, and increasingly, participation in disability programs. Here we document how labor supply, wages, health, and disability claims have evolved in the UK over the last three decades and examine how reforms to tax credits, disability benefits and other welfare programs have changed work incentives over this period. Introducing these features into an empirical structural dynamic model of life-cycle labor supply, health and disability benefit application, we examine the interactions between experience capital and health capital in driving life-cycle earnings across different education groups. Based on a panel sample of working age women in the UK, our results highlight the importance of interactions in the disability benefit, welfare and tax-credit systems for understanding the life cycle pattern of hours, employment, earnings, and disability claims, as well as for examining policy counterfactuals.

At what point do higher wage floors begin to reduce employment? Imperfect competition on the labor market suggests the presence of  a turning point: employment may rise or remain unchanged at low levels of the wage floor but declines once it becomes sufficiently high. We investigate the empirical relevance of this prediction using a comprehensive sample of 60 U.S. state-level minimum wage increases between 1980 and 2019. Exploiting variation across seven measures of minimum wage bite---including the Kaitz index, real minimum wage levels, and the workforce share below the new minimum---we test for heterogeneous employment effects consistent with a turning point. Across specifications, we find no evidence that existing policy changes have reached such a threshold. Even among the most binding increases, where the minimum wage ranges from 55 to 60 percent of the median wage, estimated employment effects remain positive, with an elasticity of 0.32 (s.e. 0.15). To interpret these findings, we calibrate a model of monopsonistic competition in labor markets and use it to quantify the location of the turning point. The model implies a threshold Kaitz index of approximately 0.62-0.72, suggesting that historical U.S. minimum wage policies have operated below the range where negative employment effects are predicted to emerge.