Chapter 21 — Further Reading

On labor economics

George Borjas, Labor Economics, McGraw-Hill, 8th edition, 2020 The standard undergraduate labor economics textbook. Comprehensive treatment of labor supply, demand, human capital, discrimination, unions, and immigration.

David Autor, "Work of the Past, Work of the Future," AEA Papers and Proceedings, 2019 Autor's overview of labor market polarization — the most-cited framework for understanding how technology reshapes work. Clear and accessible.

Claudia Goldin, Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey Toward Equity, Princeton University Press, 2021 Goldin (Nobel 2023) traces the evolution of women's labor force participation and the gender wage gap. The book shows how occupational structure, workplace flexibility, and family structure interact to produce the current gap.

On monopsony

Alan Manning, Monopsony in Motion: Imperfect Competition in Labor Markets, Princeton University Press, 2003 The modern revival of monopsony theory in labor economics. Manning argues that monopsony is much more common than economists had assumed.

José Azar, Ioana Marinescu, and Marshall Steinbaum, "Labor Market Concentration," Journal of Human Resources, 2022 Empirical evidence that U.S. labor markets are more concentrated (more monopsonistic) than previously measured.

Efraim Benmelech, Nittai Bergman, and Hyunseob Kim, "Strong Employers and Weak Employees: How Does Employer Concentration Affect Wages?" Journal of Human Resources, 2022 Finds that employer concentration (monopsony) is associated with significantly lower wages.

On the minimum wage (the complete literature)

David Card and Alan Krueger, Myth and Measurement, 1995; David Neumark and William Wascher, Minimum Wages, 2008; Arindrajit Dube et al., 2010; CBO 2019, 2021 — all cited in earlier chapters. Together, these constitute the essential minimum-wage empirical literature.

Doruk Cengiz, Arindrajit Dube, Attila Lindner, and Ben Zipperer, "The Effect of Minimum Wages on Low-Wage Jobs," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019 A comprehensive analysis using all state-level minimum wage changes from 1979 to 2016. Findings: minimum wage increases raised wages for low-wage workers with no clear effect on total low-wage employment.

On discrimination

Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination," American Economic Review, 2004 The most famous audit study. Identical résumés with white-sounding and Black-sounding names received very different callback rates. The paper provided stark evidence of racial discrimination in hiring.

Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, "Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of 'Blind' Auditions on Female Musicians," American Economic Review, 2000 Another landmark study: when symphony orchestras adopted blind auditions (behind a screen), the likelihood of hiring women increased by 25–46%.

On the gig economy

Vili Lehdonvirta, Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State, MIT Press, 2022 A comprehensive treatment of platform work and its implications for labor markets and governance.

Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger, "The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015," ILR Review, 2019 Documents the growth of non-traditional work (gig, contract, freelance) and its implications for labor market measurement and policy.

On AI and automation (case study 2)

Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, "Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets," Journal of Political Economy, 2020 Finds that industrial robots have reduced employment and wages in exposed labor markets — one of the most careful empirical studies of automation's labor-market effects.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age, W. W. Norton, 2014 An influential book arguing that digital technology (including AI) is transforming the economy in ways that benefit highly skilled workers and harm less skilled ones.

Daniel Susskind, A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond, Metropolitan Books, 2020 A more pessimistic take, arguing that AI will eventually displace large categories of human work and that society needs to prepare for a world where many people don't work in the traditional sense.

David Autor, "The Labor Market Impacts of Technological Change: From Unbridled Enthusiasm to Qualified Optimism to Vast Uncertainty," NBER Working Paper, 2024 Autor's most recent assessment. The title captures the shift in expert opinion: from confidence that technology creates jobs to genuine uncertainty about AI's long-run effects.

A reading order recommendation

If you have time for one of the sources above, read Autor's "Work of the Past, Work of the Future" (2019). It's the best single overview of how technology is reshaping the labor market.

If you want the monopsony story, read Manning's Monopsony in Motion.

If you want the AI story, read Brynjolfsson and McAfee's The Second Machine Age for the optimistic case and Susskind's A World Without Work for the pessimistic one.

Part IV is now complete. Part V — Macroeconomic Foundations — opens with Chapter 22: Measuring the Economy: GDP. We leave microeconomics behind and enter macro — total output, total employment, the price level, and the tools governments and central banks use to manage them.