This paper reconsiders the traditional approach to human capital measurement in the study of cross-country income differences. Within a broader class of neoclassical human capital aggregators, traditional accounting is found to be a theoretical lower bound on human capital difference across...

If workers self-select into industries based upon their relative productivity in different tasks, and comparative advantage is aligned with absolute advantage, then the average efficacy of a sector's workforce will be negatively correlated with its employment share. This might explain the...

We develop a framework where mismatch between vacancies and job seekers across sectors translates into higher unemployment by lowering the aggregate job-finding rate. We use this framework to measure the contribution of mismatch to the recent rise in U.S. unemployment by exploiting two sources...

This note responds to Christian Bayer (2009). Cooper and Willis (2004), hereafter CW, find the aggregate nonlinearities reported in Ricardo Caballero and Eduardo Engel (1993) and Caballero, Engel, and John Haltiwanger (1997) reflect mismeasurement of the employment gap, not nonlinearities in...

This comment addresses a point raised in Russell Cooper and Jonathan Willis (2003, 2004), which discusses whether the "gap approach" is appropriate to describe the adjustment of production factors. They show that this approach to labor adjustment as applied in Ricardo J. Caballero, Eduardo...

The stigma associated with long-term unemployment spells could create large inefficiencies in labor markets. While the existing literature points toward large stigma effects, it has proven difficult to estimate causal relationships. Using data from a field experiment, we find that long-term...

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