[12][13] Abowd's current research focuses on the creation, dissemination, privacy protection, and use of matched longitudinal data on employers and employees.

[2] Among Abowd's most influential articles was "High Wage Workers and High Wage Firms",[15] in which Abowd, Francis Kramarz, and David Margolis used a matched sample of French employees and employers to decompose annual compensation into components related to observable employee characteristics, personal heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity, and residual variation.

Their econometric approach, now widely referred to as the "AKM decomposition," laid the groundwork for a large body of subsequent research using employee-employer linked data in labor economics to understand topics including inter-industry wage differentials, firm size-wage effects, and job search and matching in the labor market.

In other widely cited work with David Card, Abowd used longitudinal data to analyze changes in individual earnings and hours over time.

[16] Abowd and Card explored the covariance structure of earnings and hours and interpreted them in the context of a life-cycle model of labor supply.