We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on local U.S. labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization while instrumenting for imports using changes in Chinese imports by...

Do robots raise or lower economic well-being? On the one hand, they raise output and bring more goods and services into reach. On the other hand, they eliminate jobs, shift investments away from machines that complement labor, lower wages, and immiserize workers who cannot compete. The net...

This paper surveys recent empirical studies on the economic impacts of immigration. The survey first examines the magnitude of immigration as an economic phenomenon in various host countries. The second part deals with the assimilation of immigrant workers into host-country labor markets and...

We propose and illustrate a Markov-switching multi-fractal duration (MSMD) model for analysis of inter-trade durations in financial markets. We establish several of its key properties with emphasis on high persistence (indeed long memory). Empirical exploration suggests MSMD's superiority...

We provide maximum likelihood estimators of term structures of conditional probabilities of bankruptcy over relatively long time horizons, incorporating the dynamics of firm-specific and macroeconomic covariates. We find evidence in the U.S. industrial machinery and instruments sector, based on...

Panel surveys generally suffer from "seam bias"--too few transitions observed within reference periods and too many reported between interviews. Seam bias is likely to affect duration models severely since both the start date and the end date of a spell may be misreported. In this paper we...

Studies of the consumption-smoothing benefits of unemployment insurance (UI) have found that the optimal benefit level is very small, perhaps even 0, for conventional levels of risk aversion. In this paper, I derive a formula for the optimal benefit rate in terms of income and price elasticities...

This paper conducts a Cox-type survival analysis of Japanese corporate firms using census-coverage data collected by METI. A study of exiting firms confirmed several characteristics of Japanese firms in the 1990s. First, excessive internalization in the corporate structure and activities is...

We provide maximum likelihood estimators of term structures of conditional probabilities of corporate default, incorporating the dynamics of firm-specific and macroeconomic covariates. For U.S. Industrial firms, based on over 390,000 firm-months of data spanning 1979 to 2004, the level and shape...

How does impatience affect job search? More impatient workers search less intensively and set a lower reservation wage. The effect on the exit rate from unemployment is unclear. In this paper we show that, if agents have exponential time preferences, the reservation wage effect dominates for...