Blacks in the United States are poorer than whites and have much lower employment rates. "Place-based" policies seek to improve the labor markets in which blacks - especially low-income urban blacks - tend to reside. We first review the literature on spatial mismatch, which provides much of the...

The current expansion has shattered the length of the previous longest peace-time boom and brought unemployment rates below four percent in 44 percent of metropolitan areas. We estimate the expansion's impact on the labor market outcomes of less-educated men. We find that young men, especially...

Recent studies of late nineteenth century labor market integration have found that despite high rates of geographic mobility relatively large inter- and intra-regional differentials in real wages persisted with little tendency toward convergence. These results point to the absence of a unified...

This paper studies the employment, productivity and welfare implications of new Chinese labor regulations intended to protect workers' employment conditions. We estimate a general equilibrium model of costly labor adjustment from data prior to the policy. Using the estimated parameters, we study...

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States, with little employment loss. Employers' reticence to hire in the preceding expansion, associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last, contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to 40...

The extent of the demographic changes in Europe is dramatic and will deeply affect future labor, financial and goods markets. The expected strain on public budgets and especially social security has already received prominent attention, but aging poses many other economic challenges that...

This paper employs MIMIC, an applied general equilibrium model of the Dutch economy, to explore various tax cuts aimed at combating unemployment and raising labor supply. MIMIC combines modern labor-market theories, a firm empirical foundation detailed description of Dutch labor-market...

Throughout the postwar era until 1995 labor productivity grew faster in Europe than in the United States. Since 1995, productivity growth in the EU-15 has slowed while that in the United States has accelerated. But Europe's productivity growth slowdown was largely offset by faster growth in...