Fracking innovations revolutionized the United States oil and gas industry and facilitated a boom in energy production in states with oil and gas resources. This paper examines effects of oil and gas booms within a state on individual employment and earnings. To account for endogenous migration...

This paper examines trends in the college wage premium (CWP) by birth cohort across the five major household surveys in the United States: the Census/ACS, CPS, NLSY, PSID, and SIPP. We document a flattening in the CWP for birth cohorts 1978 and onward in each survey and even a decline for birth...

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...

We replicate Shaw (1996) who found that individual wage growth is higher for individuals with greater preference for risk taking. Expanding her dataset with more American observations and data for Germany, Spain and Italy, we find mixed support for the earlier results. We present and estimate a...

We examine the impact of parental education on the shape of an individual's experience-earnings profile. A number of factors suggest that parental education will affect the ability of an individual to translate labor market experience into earnings. Our empirical analysis of US data suggests...

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...

The economic impact of the 2007-2009 increases in the federal minimum wage (MW) is analyzed using a sample of quick-service restaurants in Georgia and Alabama. Store-level biweekly payroll records for individual employees are used, allowing us to precisely measure the MW compliance cost for each...

We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose...

This paper explores the mobility patterns of elder workers in the United States, with a focus on mobility to and from work (e.g., commuting) across metropolitan areas and metropolitan population sizes. Using detailed time diaries from the American Time Use Survey for the years 2003-2018,...

Since the 1980s, income inequality in New Zealand has been a growing concern - particularly in metropolitan areas. At the same time, the encouragement of permanent and temporary immigration has led to the foreign-born accounting for a growing share of the population; this is disproportionally so...