Contracting out public services to private firms has ambiguous effects when quality is imperfectly observable. Using a randomized experiment over a national sample in France, we compare the efficiency of the public employment service (PES) vs. private providers in delivering very similar...

In this paper we discuss how the "encouragement design" used in randomized controlled trials can be extended to a setting with two treatments and one control group. Conditions to interpret the Two-Stage Least Squares (TSLS) estimates causally are stronger than in the case with only one treatment...

Immigrants do not fare as well as natives in economic terms; even after including many controls, an unexplained part remains. The ethnic identity entered the field of labor and migration economics in an effort to better explain the economic outcomes of immigrants, their behavior and their often...

Upon arrival in the host country, immigrants undergo a fundamental identity crisis. Their ethnic identity being questioned, they can be classified into four states – assimilation, integration, separation and marginalization. This is suggested by the ethnosizer, a newly established measure to...

Ethnic groups tend to agglomerate and assemble, mostly in urban areas. While ethnic clustering is critically debated in societies and the consequences for economic outcomes are under debate in research, the process is not yet well understood. A separate literature has also examined the cultural...

In the Western world, multiculturalism has become the way to view and form "nationhood," igniting the interest to understand and model identity. The complexity of identity formation, however, has been firm and ethnic and national identities have been deviating more and more. In this paper, we...

Language is a strong and robust determinant of international trade patterns: Countries sharing a common language trade significantly more with each other than countries using different languages, holding other factors constant. In this paper, we show that this trade-promoting effect of language...

This chapter deals with the economic and ethnic diversity caused by international labor migration, and their economic integration possibilities. It brings together three strands of literature dealing with the neoclassical economic assimilation, ethnic identities and attitudes towards immigrants...

We investigate whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are...