Employment rates in the United States fell dramatically between February 2020 and April 2020 as the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic reverberated through the labor market. This paper uses data from the CPS Basic Monthly Files to document that the employment decline was particularly severe...

This paper presents an overview and interpretation of the literature relating school quality to students' subsequent labor market success. We begin with a simple theoretical model that describes the determination of schooling and earnings with varying school quality. A key insight of the model...

We re-examine recent cross-state evidence on the employment effect of the minimum wage. A re-evaluation of the data used in Neumark and Wascher's (1992) study of the minimum wage provides no support for their conclusion that the minimum wage has an adverse effect on teenage employment. Neumark...

In the 1980s, the wages and employment rates of less-skilled Americans fell relative to those of more-skilled workers. This paper examines the contribution of the continuing inflow of less-skilled immigrants and the increasing importance of imports in the U.S. economy to these trends. Our...

How does immigration affect labor market opportunities in a receiving country? This paper contributes to the voluminous literature by reporting findings from a new (but very old) data set. Beginning in 1951, the Conference Board constructed a monthly job vacancy index by counting the number of...

In May 1981, President François Mitterrand regularized the status of undocumented immigrant workers in France. The newly legalized immigrants represented 12 percent of the non-French workforce and about 1 percent of all workers. Employers have monopsony power over undocumented workers because...