Previous estimates of the effect of unemployment on crime commonly omit determinants of criminal behavior that vary with the business cycle, creating correlation between unemployment rates and the residuals in aggregate crime regressions. In this paper, we employ several strategies that attempt...

This paper investigates whether employer sanctions for hiring undocumented workers introduced by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) adversely affected the hourly earnings of Latino workers in the southwestern U.S. We exploit the staggering of the sanctions and employee...

There has been considerable debate as to whether job stability has declined in the United States. This paper uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine the incidence of labor market turnover between 1986 and 1993. Specifically, we calculate one- and two-year...

In this paper, we analyze employer demand for ex-offenders. We use data from a recent survey of employers to analyze not only employer preferences for offenders, but also the extent to which they check criminal backgrounds in the presence of very imperfect information about the job applicants...

Recent studies have consistently found that in the United States, black job applicants are hired at a greater rate by establishments with black hiring agents than by those with white hiring agents. The results of this examination of data from the 1992-94 Multi-City Employer Survey suggest two...

Linear correlation is only an adequate means of describing the dependence between two random variables when they are jointly elliptically distributed. When the joint distribution of two or more variables is not elliptical the linear correlation coefficient becomes just one of many possible ways...

It is shown that the limiting distribution of the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test under the null hypothesis of a unit root is valid under a very general set of assumptions that goes far beyond the linear AR (∞) process assumption typically imposed. In essence, all that is required is...

A longstanding and yet unsettled question in labor economics is: does marriage cause men's wages to rise? Cross-sectional wage studies consistently find that married men earn significantly higher wages than do men who are not currently married. However, it is well-known that inferring causal...

This paper derives primitive conditions for global identification in nonlinear simultaneous equations systems. Identification is semiparametric in the sense tht it is based on a set of unconditional moment restrictions. Our contribution to the literature is twofold. First, we derive a set of...

The paper considers theoretical and empirical evidence on the impact of standards-based school reform. Our theoretical synthesis distinguishes between sorting and incentive effects of high standards, and spells out the potential tradeoffs and complementarities between enhancing efficiency and...