We propose a simple and computationally tractable methodology for computing similarity between two documents along with economic applications of the method.

I use the heterogeneous responses to labor demand shocks between differentially productive firms to quantify the contribution of labor market power to firm profitability and labor shares. Cashflows from labor market power represent about 40% of total capital income, driven by highly productive firms with large and increasing wage markdowns. About half of the change in the aggregate labor share from 1991–2014 can be attributed to the rise in labor market power.

We construct occupation-specific indicators of technological change that span over 150 years using textual analysis of patent documents and occupation task descriptions. We find strong evidence that much of technical change has been displacive of labor during this period. At the individual worker level, highly-paid workers experience relatively worse outcomes. We interpret this fact with a model of skill displacement with vintage-specific human capital. Previously titled “Technological Change and Occupations over the Long Run”.

We examine the content of newly emerging job categories over an 80-year period and examine the role of labor-augmenting and automating innovations in generating demand for new work. The distribution of new work emergence polarized from middle-paid production and clerical occupations over 1940–1980, to high-paid professional and, secondarily, low-paid services since 1980. While automating innovations depress labor demand and new work emergence, augmenting innovations have the opposite effect.

The returns and risk premia of stocks with similar characteristics but different levels of ownership comove far more with shocks to the risk-bearing capacity of financial intermediaries. This implies that intermediaries are not a veil, even within the least-intermediated asset class.