Earnings inequality declined rapidly in Argentina, Brazil and Chile during the 2000s. A reduction in the experience premium is a fundamental driver of declines in upper-tail (90/50) inequality, while a decline in the education premium is the primary determinant of the evolution of lower-tail...

This paper explores the relationship between economic performance and US unionism, focusing first on what we do and do not know based on empirical research handicapped by limited data on establishment and firm level collective bargaining coverage. Evidence on the relationship of unions with...

Economic conditions such as convexity, homogeneity, homotheticity, and monotonicity are all important assumptions or consequences of assumptions of economic functionals to be estimated. Recent research has seen a renewed interest in imposing constraints in nonparametric regression. We survey the...

In the 1990s, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Brazil passed dual citizenship laws granting their expatriates the right to naturalize in the receiving country without losing their nationality of origin. I estimate the effects of these new laws on naturalization rates and...

This paper aims to analyze and depict urban equilibrium from the perspective of acomplex force field between (positive) agglomeration economies and (negative) environmentalexternalities. Based on a simplified representation of a linear urban economy, anarchetypical model based on general...

The direct impact of local public goods on welfare is relatively easy to measure from land rents. However, the indirect effects on home and job location, on land use, and on agglomeration benefits are hard to pin down. We develop a spatial general equilibrium model for the valuation of these...

Using administrative data for West Germany, this paper investigates whether part of the urban wage premium stems from fierce competition in thick labour markets. We first establish that employers possess less wage-setting power in denser markets. Local differences in wage-setting power predict...

Learning English is a potentially profitable investment for immigrants in the U.S.: while there are initial costs, the subsequent benefits include the ability to communicate with the majority of the population, potentially leading to better paying jobs and economic success in the new country....

This paper examines the evolution of the returns to education in Portugal over the 1980s andearly 1990s. The main findings indicate that the returns to education have increased,particularly after joining the European Union in 1986. Since this occurred along with anincrease in the level of...