Does a high regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children's acquisition of host-country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the exogenous placement of guest workers from five ethnicities across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s in...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

We examine firm responses to location-based hiring subsidies. We leverage institutional features of the California Competes Tax Credit (CCTC), a large-scale business incentive program that incorporates best practices from prior job creation policies. The CCTC award selection procedure combines...

We analyze a general search model with on-the-job search and sorting of heterogeneous workers into heterogeneous jobs. This model yields a simple relationship between (i) the unemployment rate, (ii) the value of non-market time, and (iii) the max-mean wage differential. The latter measure of...

We argue in favor of the shareholder model of the firm for three main reasons. First, serving multiple stakeholders leads to ill-defined property rights. What sounds like a fair compromise between stakeholders can easily evolve in a permanent struggle about the ultimate goal of the company....

This paper analyses monthly hours worked in the US over the sample period 1939m1 - 2011m10 using a cyclical long memory model; this is based on Gegenbauer processes and characterised by autocorrelations decaying to zero cyclically and at a hyperbolic rate along with a spectral density that is...

Cross-country evidence on student achievement might be hampered by omitted country characteristics such as language or legal differences. This paper uses cross-state variation in Germany, whose sixteen states share the same language and legal system, but pursue different education policies. The...

Recent policy debate on minimum wages has focused not only on raising the minimum wage, but on eliminating the tip credit for restaurant workers. We use data on past variation in tip credits - or minimum wages for restaurant workers - to provide evidence on the potential impacts of eliminating...

The disagreement among studies of the employment effects of minimum wages in the United States is well known. What is less well known, and more puzzling, is the absence of agreement on what the research literature says - that is, how economists even summarize the body of evidence on the...