In the 1980s, many U.S. cities initiated programs reserving a proportion of government contracts for minority-owned businesses. The staggered introduction of these set-aside programs is used to estimate their impacts on the self-employment and employment rates of African-American men. Black...

We estimate models of earnings and employment outcomes for a sample of white and nonwhite male immigrants drawn from the Labour Force Survey between 1993 and 2002. Immigrants who arrived to enter the labour market are distinguished from those who arrived to complete their education. Diverse...

Historically coal has offered both benefits and costs to urban areas. Benefits include coal's role in fueling industry and thus employment. The primary costs are air pollution and its impact on human health. This paper starts by using a Rosen-Roback style model to examine how differences in...

In many countries, Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) establishes less strict dismissal procedures for specific groups of workers. This paper builds a simple matching model with heterogeneous workers in order to analyze this feature of EPL. We use the model to analyze the effects of reforms...

We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

This paper argues that expectations are an important element that needs to be included into the analysis of the effects of the minimum wage on employment. We show in a standard matching model that the observed employment effect is higher the lower is the likelihood associated with the minimum...