Erik Hurst

About

Erik Hurst is an economist whose work lies at the intersection of macroeconomics, labor economics and urban economics. His research addresses topics such as declining male participation rates, the determinants of U.S. wage growth, the welfare losses to society stemming from gender and racial discrimination, the causes and consequences of urban gentrification, the economics of time use, small business dynamics, life-cycle consumption profiles, the role of housing and mortgage markets in driving macroeconomic conditions, and the choice to invest in human capital.

Research topics

• Labour economics
• Economics
• Political Science
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Demographic economics
• Accounting
• Engineering
• Physical therapy
• Business

Selected publications

• Aggregate Nominal Wage Adjustments: New Evidence from Administrative Payroll Data

  American Economic Review · 2021 · 217 citations

  Using administrative payroll data from the largest US payroll processing company, we measure the extent of nominal wage rigidity in the United States. The data allow us to define a worker’s per-period base contract wage separately from other forms of compensation such as overtime premiums and bonuses. We provide evidence that firms use base wages to cyclically adjust the marginal cost of their workers. Nominal base wage declines are much rarer than previously thought with only 2 percent of job-s…

  DOI

• The U.S. Labor Market During the Beginning of the Pandemic Recession

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020 · 135 citations

  DOI

• Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men

  Journal of Political Economy · 2020 · 104 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  We propose a methodology exploiting time diary data and “leisure Engel curves” to infer quality changes across leisure activities and measure the effects on the marginal return to leisure. We study leisure returns for men aged 21–30, who have shifted leisure toward video gaming and recreational computing and have had larger market work hour declines than older men or women since 2004. We show that recreational computing is distinctly a leisure luxury for younger men. By increasing the value of t…

  DOI

• College Majors, Occupations, and the Gender Wage Gap

  The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 2021 · 73 citations

  The paper assesses gender differences in pre-labor market specialization among the college-educated and highlights how those differences have evolved over time. Women choose majors with lower potential earnings (based on male wages associated with those majors) and subsequently sort into occupations with lower potential earnings given their major choice. These differences have narrowed over time, but recent cohorts of women still choose majors and occupations with lower potential earnings. Diffe…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Income Growth and the Distributional Effects of Urban Spatial Sorting

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2023-04-25 · 65 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract We explore the impact of rising incomes at the top of the distribution on spatial sorting patterns within large U.S. cities. We develop and quantify a spatial model of a city with heterogeneous agents and non-homothetic preferences for neighbourhoods with endogenous amenity quality. As the rich get richer, demand increases for the high-quality amenities available in downtown neighbourhoods. Rising demand drives up house prices and spurs the development of higher quality neighbourhoods d…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mark Aguiar

  188 shared

• Joseph Vavra

  University of Chicago

  101 shared

• Amit Seru

  85 shared

• Benjamin J. Keys

  85 shared

• Kerwin Kofi Charles

  69 shared

• Mark Bils

  University of Rochester

  41 shared

• Patrick J. Kehoe

  40 shared

• Thomas Winberry

  California University of Pennsylvania

  40 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  University of Chicago

  2005

• M.A., Economics

  University of Chicago

  2002

• B.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1999

Awards & honors

• TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly…
• Ewing Marion Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research…
• Emory Williams Award for Outstanding MBA Teaching (2008)
• Emory Williams Award for Outstanding MBA Teaching (2010)
• McKinsey Award for Excellence in Teaching (2017)

Similar researchers at University of Chicago

• Anil Kashyaph-84
• Lars Hansenh-80
• Chang-Tai Hsiehh-56