The Post‑COVID Decline in the Labor Share
Richard Audoly, Miles Guerin, Srinidhi Narayanan, and Rachel Schuh
The labor share of income in the U.S. is currently at its lowest-ever level in the post-war period. The labor share measures the fraction of economic output paid to workers as wages and salaries. As such, it is a useful benchmark for wage growth: when the labor share falls, it means that productivity, prices, or both are growing faster than wages. After much-studied drops in the 2000s, the labor share fell sharply again after the COVID pandemic. In this post, we compare the dynamics of the labor share post-COVID to earlier periods to understand whether the recent decline represents the continuation of a trend or a new and distinct phenomenon. We find that both the cyclicality of the labor share and the contribution of reallocation to the labor share post-COVID are similar to earlier periods.
Do Job Postings Show Early Labor‑Market Effects of AI?
Richard Audoly, Miles Guerin, and Giorgio Topa
As generative AI tools become more widely used, a key issue is the technology’s impact on labor demand. Where might we find evidence of that impact? In this post, we examine whether early evidence of AI’s effect on the labor market appears in firms’ job postings. We combine an occupational measure of AI exposure with detailed U.S. job-posting data from Lightcast, which aggregates listings from company career pages, national and local job boards, and job-listing aggregators. Using this data, we test whether postings for AI-exposed occupations declined disproportionately since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. We find that, while overall hiring has slowed since then, the evidence from job postings provides little indication of a distinct AI-driven decline in labor demand.
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