The Economics of Work with Ben Zweig

Leah Boustan - What Immigration Tells Us About Economic Opportunity

The debate about immigration is usually framed around politics and labor markets. But the deeper story includes mobility. Who gets ahead, how, and why where they start determines so much about where you end up. In this episode, Ben sits down with Leah Boustan, professor at Yale and co-author of Streets of Gold, to dig into what the data on immigration reveals about economic opportunity across generations. Topics covered: * Why immigration is an underappreciated driver of global mobility * The Norway brothers study: why migrants earned double what their brothers who stayed earned, and why it had little to do with changing occupations * What immigrants bring back when they return home and how that shapes sending countries * How firms fit into immigrant assimilation * Location and mobility: why immigrants have historically moved to high-productivity cities, whether that's changing, and what remote work means for this pattern * The gap between public sentiment toward immigration and what economists know about its effects About Leah Boustan: Leah Boustan is a professor of economics at Yale University and a research associate at the NBER. She is the co-author, with Ran Abramitzky, of Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success, which uses newly digitized historical records to trace the economic trajectories of immigrants and their descendants across generations. Check out Leah's book Streets of Gold [https://economics.princeton.edu/streets-of-gold-americas-untold-story-of-immigrant-success/] Follow Ben on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-zweig/?isSelfProfile=false] Follow us on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelio-labs/] Sign up for our Newsletter [https://us.list-manage.com/c2HAUUyLb_e?e=2bdcb71555&c2id=454b62dc897f000ca0825a27c8968771] Visit our website [https://www.reveliolabs.com/] for more information Get in touch with us at info@reveliolabs.com [info@reveliolabs.com]

John Boudreau - Are Business Leaders Listening to HR Theory?

Finance has net present value. Operations has bottleneck theory. What does HR have? In this episode, Ben sits down with John Boudreau, professor emeritus at USC and one of the most influential thinkers in the history of human resource management, to explore a question he has spent 40 years trying to answer: why do leaders who make rigorous, model-driven decisions about financial and operational assets continue to rely on gut instinct when it comes to people? Topics covered: * Why leaders who would never make a capital investment without a discounted cash flow model routinely make multi-million dollar talent decisions on instinct * The bottleneck problem: why investing equally in every role is as irrational as improving every stage of a production line simultaneously * Why economists were studying tasks long before HR was * Why AI pilots aren't experiments: the difference between watching what happens and actually measuring it * What it would take to create generally accepted principles for people decisions, and why codified principles matter more than codified measures * Why the word "job" may be the single biggest obstacle to clear thinking about the future of work About John Boudreau: John Boudreau is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. He is the author of more than 200 articles and ten books, including Beyond HR, Retooling HR, and Reinventing Jobs, and is widely regarded as one of the founding thinkers of the people analytics movement. Follow John on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-boudreau-115500/] Follow us on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelio-labs/] Follow Ben on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-zweig/?isSelfProfile=false] Sign up for our Newsletter [https://us.list-manage.com/c2HAUUyLb_e?e=2bdcb71555&c2id=454b62dc897f000ca0825a27c8968771] Visit our website [https://www.reveliolabs.com/] for more information Get in touch with us at info@reveliolabs.com [info@reveliolabs.com]

Dan Hamermesh - Time, Beauty, and What Economics Gets Wrong About Work

Keynes predicted we'd be working 15-hour weeks by now. So what went wrong? Does it even matter? In this episode, Ben sits down with Dan Hamermesh, one of the most prolific and wide-ranging labor economists of the past half century, to explore questions the field rarely asks: Why do Americans work more than anyone else in the rich world? What do we actually do with leisure when we get it? Topics covered: * Why cutting work hours wouldn't make us poor, and why policy, not technology, might be the only realistic path to change * The "greedy jobs" debate, and what's driving long hours at the top * What people do with extra leisure time * The coordination failure at the heart of overwork About Dan Hamermesh: Dan Hamermesh is an economist whose career has spanned more than five decades, with foundational contributions to labor economics, the study of time use, and the economics of beauty and discrimination. He is the author of Beauty Pays and Spending Time, among other books, and has been a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Barnard, and elsewhere. Check out Dan's books Beauty Pays [https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691158174/beauty-pays?srsltid=AfmBOoo_GypEPJbTfViQ5aNYu6ZutzvS6iX_JdeB1HLvwIoTJgyI5hGj] and Spending Time [https://www.amazon.com/Spending-Time-Most-Valuable-Resource/dp/0190853832] Follow Ben on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-zweig/?isSelfProfile=false] Follow us on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelio-labs/] Sign up for our Newsletter [https://us.list-manage.com/c2HAUUyLb_e?e=2bdcb71555&c2id=454b62dc897f000ca0825a27c8968771] Visit our website [https://www.reveliolabs.com/] for more information Get in touch with us at info@reveliolabs.com [info@reveliolabs.com]

Rachel Lipson - Bridging Business, Education, and Policy to Build a Better Workforce

What does it take to connect the worlds of academia, government, and industry around workforce development? The answer requires someone fluent in all three. In this episode, Ben sits down with Rachel Lipson, researcher at Harvard, fellow at Brookings and the Aspen Institute, and author, to explore what's working (and what isn't) in America's approach to training workers for the jobs of today and tomorrow. Topics covered: * Why business, education, and policy need to operate together * The CHIPS Act as a workforce policy outlier: how it flipped the government's default from antipoverty lens to competitiveness and innovation * Why demand-side workforce policy is so rare in the U.S. * The Tesla and Austin Community College case: how a company-college partnership went from a soft PR commitment to a proven productivity driver * Why subsidizing firm-specific training isn't a corporate giveaway * What community colleges can offer that on-the-job hiring can't * How to think about preparing the next generation for jobs that don't exist yet About Rachel Lipson: Rachel Lipson is a researcher and policy entrepreneur working across Harvard, Brookings, and the Aspen Institute, with a focus on workforce development, social mobility, and the relationship between education and economic opportunity. She is the author of a forthcoming book examining how employers and training institutions can better work together to build a skilled workforce. Follow Rachel on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-t-lipson/] Follow Ben on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-zweig/?isSelfProfile=false] Follow us on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelio-labs/] Sign up for our Newsletter [https://us.list-manage.com/c2HAUUyLb_e?e=2bdcb71555&c2id=454b62dc897f000ca0825a27c8968771] Visit our website [https://www.reveliolabs.com/] for more information Get in touch with us at info@reveliolabs.com [info@reveliolabs.com]

Daniel Rock - What Automation Means for How We Organize Jobs

What happens to a job when AI touches it? The answer depends on something most frameworks aren't designed to measure. In this episode, Ben sits down with Daniel Rock, assistant professor at Penn and co-founder of Work Helix, to dig into AI exposure. Topics covered: * What "AI exposure" measures * Why tasks are "assemblages," not atoms, and what that means for how we think about job change * The task chaining paper: why the sequence in which tasks are automated matters as much as which tasks get automated * Why the handoff costs of breaking work into steps also have handoff benefits and when human checkpoints create value rather than friction * Jobs as equilibrium objects: why there may never be a complete theory of how tasks get bundled into jobs, and what we can learn from the attempt * What academics can learn from entrepreneurs and vice versa * Why the green shoots of AI's impact on science and medicine point toward something much bigger than productivity gains at work About Daniel Rock: Daniel Rock is an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Work Helix. His research sits at the intersection of economics, organizational behavior, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on how technology changes work and how firms can measure and manage that change. Follow Daniel on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-rock-61252485/?isSelfProfile=false] Papers discussed: Weak Bundle, Strong Bundle [https://cepr.org/publications/dp21453] Task Chaining [https://www.nber.org/papers/w34859] Follow us on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelio-labs/] Follow Ben on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-zweig/?isSelfProfile=false] Sign up for our Newsletter [https://us.list-manage.com/c2HAUUyLb_e?e=2bdcb71555&c2id=454b62dc897f000ca0825a27c8968771] Visit our website [https://www.reveliolabs.com/] for more information Get in touch with us at info@reveliolabs.com [info@reveliolabs.com]