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Can transport infrastructure expand long-term labour opportunities and weaken the occupational link between parents and children? We estimate the causal effect of railway access on occupational attainment and intergenerational mobility in nineteenth-century England and Wales. Exploiting the as-good-as-random opening of built and planned stations, we address endogeneity in rail proximity. Sons living 5 km closer to a station were more likely to leave farming for industrial and commercial jobs, often entering the top quartile of the occupational distribution. Railway access increased the probability of working in a different occupation than one’s father by 2% and of upward mobility by 6%.

This paper examines firms' incentives to provide workplace amenities, focusing on employer-provided childcare, and the implications for gender inequality. Using rich matched employer-employee data linked to a comprehensive firm survey in Germany, we document substantial and persistent effects of employer-provided childcare on mothers' labor market trajectories. Firms that offer childcare experience higher retention rates and notably shorter career interruptions among first-time mothers, especially those with high pre-birth wages, resulting in meaningful reductions in child penalties of 4.7 percentage points for high-wage mothers. The adoption of firm-provided childcare is also associated with stronger employment growth -- particularly among mothers and female talent in high-wage occupations -- without systematic adverse wage effects for women or mothers. Our findings align with models of imperfect competition, indicating that firms with greater monopsony power have stronger incentives to provide valuable workplace amenities. While firm-provided childcare plays a critical role in reducing gender gaps within firms, our findings also show that access to these benefits is uneven, widening disparities among women and mothers across firms. Includes bibliographical references (pages 31-36).

In canonical models, the labour share is orthogonal to immigration shocks in the long run, regardless of the impact of immigration on productivity. In contrast, this paper provides evidence that immigration increases labour productivity while reducing the labour share. We produce this evidence using data from Great Britain with a shift-share instrument that exploits European Union expansions and changes in immigration to other high-income countries. Our results are consistent with the predictions from imperfect labour market models, where immigrant and native workers are heterogeneous in skills, and the former have lower labour supply elasticities than the latter. A significant implication of our analysis is that immigration redistributes income from workers to employers.

This paper offers new evidence of the role of immigration in shaping the educational and labour market outcomes of natives. We use administrative data on the entire English higher education system and exploit the idiosyncratic variation of foreign students within university-degree across four cohorts of undergraduate students. Foreign peers have zero to mild effects on natives' educational outcomes, such as graduation probability and degree classification. Significant effects are found on displacement across universities and degree types after enrolment, although these outcomes are rare occurrences. In line with the mild effects on education outcomes, we also find little evidence of foreign peers affecting early labour market outcomes of native graduates.