What follows will outline how the coca economy might be one specific and persistent factor that leads people towards a criminal life path, and explain how a recent study establishes this for rural Peru. Children are put on a criminal life path when they invest in criminal human capital rather than formal schooling, when the […]
Labour Markets
We report on research that concerns the education and training people receive, the amount that they work, what they do, and what they earn. Topics of interest include:
• Unemployment
• The wage and employment response to unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and income taxes and transfers
• School quality, educational attainment, and economic outcomes
• Regulations governing minimum wages, overtime pay, hiring and firing, and collective bargaining
• Discrimination in employment and pay
• The labour market effects of immigration
• The decision to retire
• Inequality and intergenerational mobility
• Marriage, fertility, and labour market behavior
Latest articles
The Long-Run Impact of Immigration on Local and Aggregate Productivity
Can increases in the size of the population raise productivity? There are ample theoretical reasons to believe that the answer to this question ought to be yes. Most theories of growth predict a positive relationship between innovation incentives and market size, and many models of international trade or development economics highlight the importance of agglomeration […]
Tackling Youth Unemployment: Evidence from a Labor Market Experiment in Uganda
Motivation: youth unemployment as a global challenge Young people face a higher risk of unemployment than adults in all countries of the world (ILO 2020). Understanding which active labor market policies are effective at facilitating the transition of youth into remunerative employment is thus critical to ensure global economic and social stability. Nowhere is the […]
Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality
Last summer’s mass mobilization for racial justice sparked debates around how to combat entrenched racial inequality in the United States. Recent corporate diversity initiatives, while a step in the right direction, are not sufficient to topple structural racism in the economy. One of the most striking dimensions of inequality in the United States is the […]
US immigration: effects on wages, internal migration, and welfare
Immigration has been a central political debate in the United States for decades, in part because of public concerns about its magnitude and its composition. For example, in the early 2000s, around 1.25 million immigrants arrived each year (Card, 2009). The share of immigrants in the US working-age population increased from 10% in 1990 to […]
Competitive labor markets boost wage growth
A combination of empirical facts and economic theory suggest rising employer concentration contributed to wage stagnation in industrialized economies. Economic theory shows how labor market concentration can suppress wages by reducing workers’ bargaining leverage vis-à-vis powerful employers. Empirical evidence suggests that labor markets have become more concentrated since the late 20th century, shifting from a […]
Earnings Dynamics, Changing Job Skills, and STEM careers
The US labor market is particularly dynamic for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) jobs, with new technologies proliferating throughout workplaces every year. This technological change is the engine of long-run productivity growth and rising living standards. In the shorter run, however, workers in technology-intensive occupations must constantly learn on the job, or risk becoming […]
Can Integration Change Gender Attitudes?
The research described here asks whether integration can change gender attitudes even in a traditionally male-dominated environment. One reason to ask this question is that occupational gender segregation remains high, even though women make up nearly half the labor force in most rich countries (Blau et al. 2013). This pattern may reflect preferences that differ […]
Face-to-Face Communication in Organizations
The international response to the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasised working from home, especially for office workers tasked with the generation and processing of information. Compliance has generally been very high, with most companies not just encouraging, but mandating, their employees to work from home. This has led to an emptying of city centres and financial […]
Second chance: the social benefits of diversion in the criminal justice system
Public officials are increasingly diverting people from the criminal justice system, usually to help them to avoid a criminal record and its associated consequences. The practice has become an important part of recent efforts to reform criminal justice policy, and it often enables corrections systems to conserve scarce resources. Despite the growing popularity of criminal […]
