Are people prone to selecting occupations with highly skewed income distributions despite minuscule chances of success? Assembling a comprehensive pool of potential teenage entrants into professional tennis (a typical winner-take-all market), we construct objective measures of relative ability...

Exogenous shocks often impact a local labor market more than at the national level. This study improves upon the standard Difference in Difference (DD) approach by examining exogenous shocks using a Generalized Difference in Difference (GDD) econometric approach that identifies the effects of...

This paper employs United States Census data to study the occupational allocation of immigrants. The data reveal that the occupational shares of various ethnic groups have grown drastically in regional labor markets over the period 1980 to 2000. We examine the extent to which this growth can be...

In recent years, Spain has received unprecedented immigration flows. Between 2001 and 2006 the fraction of the population born abroad more than doubled, increasing from 4.8% to 10.8%. For Spanish provinces with above-median inflows (relative to population), immigration increased the high school...

We show how small initial wealth differences between low skilled black and white workers can generate large differences in their labor-market outcomes. This even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against blacks or exogenous differences in the distance to jobs. Because of the...

While it is well known that some areas of the United States receive more immigrants than others, less is understood about the extent to which the character of immigration varies as well. There is much broader geographic variation in the skill and demographic composition of immigrants than...

We estimate the effects of Wal-Mart stores on county-level retail employment and earnings, accounting for endogeneity of the location and timing of Wal-Mart openings that most likely biases the evidence against finding adverse effects of Wal-Mart stores. We address the endogeneity problem using...

We propose using sign restrictions to identify regional labor demand shocks in a panel VAR of US federal states. Observed migration responds significantly, but less persistently than the residual-based migration measure constructed by Blanchard and Katz (1992). -- regional labor markets ;...

The unemployment rate in France is roughly 6 percentage points higher for African immigrants than for natives. In the US the unemployment rate is approximately 9 percentage points higher for blacks than for whites. Commute time data indicates that minorities face longer commute times to work,...