Many countries have policies aimed at creating jobs in depressed areas with high unemployment rates. In standard spatial equilibrium models with perfectly competitive labor and land markets, local job creation efforts are distortionary. We develop a stylized model of frictional local labor...

We explore the links between social capital and labor market networks at the neighborhood level. We harness rich data taken from multiple sources, including matched employer-employee data with which we measure the strength of labor market networks, data on behavior such as voting patterns that...

Over the last thirty years, there has been a rise in several empirical measures of local labor market monopsony power. The monopsonist has a profit incentive to offer lower wages to local workers. Mobile high skill workers can avoid the lower monopsony wages by moving to other more competitive...

This paper measures excess labor supply in equilibrium. We examine hiring shocks--which employ 24% of the labor force in external month-long jobs--in Indian local labor markets. In peak months, wages increase instantaneously and local aggregate employment declines. In lean months, consistent...

We study the labor markets in China and the United States, the two largest economies in the world, by examining the evolution of their cross-sectional age-earnings profiles during the past thirty years. We find that, first, the peak age in the cross-sectional age-earnings profiles, which we...

This paper makes three primary contributions. First, we demonstrate the usefulness of general equilibrium models as tools with which to draw policy implications for policies implemented in practice only as small-scale social experiments. Second, we illustrate the usefulness of social experiments...

I argue for increased reliance on non-U.S. data and policy evaluations to understand basic labor- market parameters and to predict the effects of changes in U.S. labor-market policies. Foreign experiences generate exogenous shocks to labor costs that create unusual opportunities to measure...

This essay sets out a framework for evaluating empirical work in terms of the ability of the data to provide adequate parameter estimates and hypothesis tests about the true underlying structure. Problems of aggregation, representativeness and structural change are discussed in detail. These...

For an economic system not to exhibit debt neutrality it must be true that changes in the time profile of lump-sum taxes redistributes resources between heterogeneous consumers. OLD models have age heterogeneity because of a positive birth rate. Unless a bequest motive or child-to-parent gift...