"Subjective Job Insecurity and the Rise of the 'Precariat':  Evidence from the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States" (with Alan Manning) - Review of Economics and Statistics (2024), 106(3): 748-761. 

Appendix. Coverage in the Financial Times and The Economist

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.

"Should I Stay or Should I Go? Return Migration from the United States" (with Alan Manning) - February 2024, CEP Discussion Paper no. 1980.

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.