This paper investigates the potential reasons for the surprisingly different labor market performance of the United States, Canada, Germany, and several other OECD countries during and after the Great Recession of 2008-09. Unemployment rates did not change substantially in Germany, increased and...

We examine the incentive effects of transfer programs using a unique policy episode. Prior to 1989, social assistance recipients without children in Quebec who were under age 30 received benefits 60 percent lower than recipients older than 30. We use this sharp discontinuity in policy to...

Standard models suggest that adverse labor demand shocks will lead to bigger employment losses if institutional factors like minimum wages and trade unions prevent downward wage adjustments. Some economists have argued that this insight explains the contrast between the United States, where real...

This paper presents a semiparametric procedure to analyze the effects of institutional and labor market factors on recent changes in the U.S. distribution of wages. The effects of these factors are estimated by applying kernel density methods to appropriately 'reweighted' samples. The procedure...