Stronger enforcement of discrimination laws can help to reduce disparities in economic outcomes with respect to race, ethnicity, and gender in the United States. However, the data necessary to detect possible discrimination and to act to counter it is not publicly available - in particular, data...

Reducing high public debts is key for countries seeking to restore fiscal capacity and resilience in the wake of recent crises. But large debt reductions are rare. Jamaica stands out for reducing its debt from 144 percent of GDP to 72 percent over the last decade, a record achieved by running...

The effects of minimum wages on employment, wages, earnings, and incomes, have been studied and debated for decades. In recent years, however, researchers have turned to the effects on a multitude of other behaviors and outcomes - largely related to health. I review and assess the large and...

Correspondence studies have found evidence of age discrimination in callback rates for older workers, but less is known about whether job advertisements can themselves shape the age composition of the applicant pool. We construct job ads for administrative assistant, retail, and security guard...

Using hand-collected data spanning more than a decade on European banks' sovereign debt portfolios, we show that the trust of residents of a bank's countries of operation in the residents of a potential target country of investment has a positive, statistically significant, and economically...

We examine firm responses to location-based hiring subsidies. We leverage institutional features of the California Competes Tax Credit (CCTC), a large-scale business incentive program that incorporates best practices from prior job creation policies. The CCTC award selection procedure combines...

Gendered discrimination based on age and disability is a pressing issue, because this discrimination can interfere with the goal of lengthening work lives, especially for older women. In the United States, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibit...

California has the highest Earned Income Tax (EITC) supplement to the federal EITC, with an 85% supplement rate. However, we find that despite the apparent generosity of the California EITC, there is no employment effect on less-skilled single mothers, in sharp contrast to the evidence of...

Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) argue that state-level minimum wage variation correlated with economic shocks generates spurious evidence that higher minimum wages reduce employment. Using minimum wage variation within contiguous county pairs sharing a state border, they find no relationship...

A recent approach to testing for customer statistical discrimination involves studying price gaps between sellers from different gender, race, or ethnic groups and how they evolve as buyers obtain more information about seller quality. We consider a similar setting, testing for statistical...