In this article, we show that remote work is associated with higher skill and qualification requirements in hiring. Drawing on qualitative interviews, we identify several mechanisms through which remote work raises hiring standards. By reducing face-to-face interaction and real-time communication, remote work makes training and employee support more challenging, expands the pool of applicants, and leads employers to rely more on quantifiable metrics. We tested these ideas by analyzing over 50 million job postings from 28 European countries between 2018 and 2021 and found that the shift to remote work is associated with a higher number of required skills and greater work experience for a job. These findings indicate that remote work contributes to skill upgrading in the labor market.

This article argues that a society’s level of social trust influences employers’ hiring strategies. Employers can focus either on applicants’ potential and select on foundational skills (e.g., social skills, math skills) or on their readiness and select on more-advanced skills (e.g., pricing a derivative). The higher (lower) the social trust—people’s trust in their fellow members of society—the more (less) employers are willing to invest in employees and grant them role flexibility. Employers in higher-trust societies are therefore more attentive to applicants’ potential, focusing more on foundational skills than on advanced skills. We empirically test this theory by using a novel dataset of more than 50 million job postings from the 28 European Union countries. We find that the higher a country’s social trust, the more its employers require foundational skills instead of advanced skills. Our identification strategy takes advantage of multinational firms in our sample and uses measures of bilateral (country-to-country) trust to predict job requirements, while including an instrumental variable and fixed effects on country, year, employer, and occupation. These findings suggest a novel pathway by which social trust shapes employment practices and organizational strategies.

This study explores the longevity of artistic reputation. We empirically examine whether artists are more- or less-venerated after their death. We construct a massive historical corpus spanning 1795 to 2020 and build separate word-embedding models for each five-year period to examine how the reputations of over 3,300 famous artists—including painters, architects, composers, musicians, and writers—evolve after their death. We find that most artists gain their highest reputation right before their death, after which it declines, losing nearly one SD every century. This posthumous decline applies to artists in all domains, includes those who died young or unexpectedly, and contradicts the popular view that artists’ reputations endure. Contrary to the Matthew effect, the reputational decline is the steepest for those who had the highest reputations while alive. Two mechanisms—artists’ reduced visibility and the public’s changing taste—are associated with much of the posthumous reputational decline. This study underscores the fragility of human reputation and shows how the collective memory of artists unfolds over time.

Why do people engage with similar others despite ample opportunities to interact with dissimilar others? We argue that adversity or setbacks may have a stronger deteriorative effect on ties made up of dissimilar individuals, prompting people to give up on such ties more easily, which, over the long run, results in people forming ties with similar others. We examine this argument in the context of Association of Tennis Professionals tournaments, using data on 9,669 unique doubles pairs involving 1,812 unique players from 99 countries from 2000 to 2020. We find that doubles pairs with players from different countries are more likely to dissolve after a setback, especially if those countries lack social trust and connections with one another; this reality further contributes to the individual player’s increased tendency to collaborate with same-country players in the next tournament. Our study has direct implications for interventions for diversity and inclusion.

Technological change does more than create and destroy jobs. It can overturn the career hierarchies that determine who advances and whose expertise counts. I argue that major technological shifts create temporary mobility windows in expert labor markets, weakening the advantage of incumbents and opening opportunities for workers who align early with the new regime. I test this argument using career histories from hundreds of millions of online professional profiles and U.S. patent records from 1976 to 2023. I identify when firms adopt artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies and examine how adoption changes access to new roles, career advancement, turnover, and the impact of inventive work. I find that after firms adopt AI, new AI roles increasingly go to less-experienced workers. Workers with more experience in the prior computing regime become less likely to advance and more likely to leave, even though general labor-market experience continues to be rewarded. Workers who move into AI roles also tend to enter positions usually held by more-experienced workers. The patent evidence shows a similar pattern: after firms enter a new technological regime, experience in the prior regime becomes less predictive of an inventor’s most consequential work. This erosion recurs across technological waves and is concentrated in areas of expertise that the new technology can itself perform. My findings show that technological change reshapes expert labor markets not only by changing the skills organizations demand, but also by loosening established hierarchies and changing who gains access to frontier work.

Modern liberal democracy rests on the idea that public authority should be insulated from private economic power. The United States is often treated as a leading case. We test that idea by examining whether private social ties between politicians and business leaders shape congressional voting. We digitize U.S. social club records and link them to members of Congress, business executives, roll call votes, and floor debate across the twentieth century. Using these data, we then identify bills with clear industry stakes and ask whether legislators connected to affected executives are more likely to vote in ways that benefit those interests. We find strong evidence that they are. The pattern is strongest for high-importance bills and when connected executives’ firms have a direct stake in the policy. Our findings point to a form of influence that is distinct from formal lobbying and campaign finance. More broadly, they suggest that the functioning of American political institutions cannot be understood from formal rules alone, as private elite ties can still shape public decisions.

New technological fields do not emerge from technical possibility alone. Before firms invest in a new domain, they must first come to see it as a legitimate problem worth solving. We examine how environmental technologies became objects of corporate invention before strong markets or regulatory mandates had developed. We combine historical data on environmental charities, elite social affiliations, and U.S. patents from 1900 to 2000. Using these data, we first ask whether the emergence of environmental organizations in local communities changed the direction of inventive activity. We then examine whether firms whose executives were socially connected to environmental elites through shared club memberships became more likely to produce environmental inventions. We find that counties produce a higher share of environmental patents after the founding of their first environmental charity, with no comparable increase following the founding of charities in unrelated domains. We also find that firms become more likely to develop environmental technologies when their executives are socially connected to environmental elites. These patterns emerge before the expansion of modern environmental regulation and are especially visible in how inventors describe the purpose of their work. Our findings show how civic organizations and elite networks can shape the direction of innovation by influencing which social problems firms come to recognize as credible domains for technical investment.