This paper explores the relationship between economic performance and US unionism, focusing first on what we do and do not know based on empirical research handicapped by limited data on establishment and firm level collective bargaining coverage. Evidence on the relationship of unions with...

Economic conditions such as convexity, homogeneity, homotheticity, and monotonicity are all important assumptions or consequences of assumptions of economic functionals to be estimated. Recent research has seen a renewed interest in imposing constraints in nonparametric regression. We survey the...

This paper aims to analyze and depict urban equilibrium from the perspective of acomplex force field between (positive) agglomeration economies and (negative) environmentalexternalities. Based on a simplified representation of a linear urban economy, anarchetypical model based on general...

The direct impact of local public goods on welfare is relatively easy to measure from land rents. However, the indirect effects on home and job location, on land use, and on agglomeration benefits are hard to pin down. We develop a spatial general equilibrium model for the valuation of these...

Using administrative data for West Germany, this paper investigates whether part of the urban wage premium stems from fierce competition in thick labour markets. We first establish that employers possess less wage-setting power in denser markets. Local differences in wage-setting power predict...

This paper examines the evolution of the returns to education in Portugal over the 1980s andearly 1990s. The main findings indicate that the returns to education have increased,particularly after joining the European Union in 1986. Since this occurred along with anincrease in the level of...

We combine two empirical observations in a general equilibrium occupational choice model. The first is that entrepreneurs have more control than employees over the employment of and accruals from assets, such as human capital. The second observation is that entrepreneurs enjoy higher returns to...

We develop models of optimal linear and non-linear income taxation with endogenous human capital formation to explore optimal education subsidies. Optimal subsidies on education ensure efficiency in human capital accumulation and thus play an important role in alleviating the tax distortions on...

This paper proposes a new approach to identify the wage effects of training.The idea is to narrow down the comparison group by only taking into consideration theworkers who wanted to participate in training but did not do so because of some randomevent. The point estimate of the return to...