In 2002 we published a paper in which we used state space time series methods to analyse the teenage employment‐federal minimum wage relationship in the US (Bazen and Marimoutou, 2002). The study used quarterly data for the 46 year period running from 1954 to 1999. We detected a small,...

To better understand unemployment dynamics it is key to assess the role played by job creation and job destruction. Although the U.S. case has been studied extensively, the importance of job finding and employment exit rates to unemployment variability remains unsettled. The aim of this paper is...

Swedish labor market programs appear large from an international perspective, yet their consequences are not fully investigated and understood. In this paper we estimate a switching regression model with training effect modeled as a random coefficient, partitioned in an observed and unobserved...

SIPP data are used to analyze the wealth of the U.S. foreign-born population. We find that the median wealth level of U.S.-born couples is 2.3 times the median of foreign-born couples, while the median wealth level of U.S.-born singles is three times that of foreign-born singles. Further, there...

We analyze four methods to measure unexplained gaps in mean outcomes: three decompositions based on the seminal work of Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973) and an approach involving a seemingly naive regression that includes a group indicator variable. Our analysis yields two principal findings. We...

Researchers are often interested in estimating the causal effect of some treatment on individual criminality. For example, two recent relatively prominent papers have attempted to estimate the respective direct effects of marriage and gang participation on individual criminal activity. One...