This paper examines the impact of minimum wages on earnings and employment in selected branches of the retail-trade sector, 1990-2005, using county-level data on employment and a panel regression framework that allows for county-specific trends in sectoral outcomes. We focus on particular...

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 test the hypothesis that local government officials in jurisdictions that have higher local sales taxes are more likely to use fiscal zoning to attract retailing. We find that total retail employment is not significantly affected by local sales tax rates, but employment in big box and anchor...

Firms and workers predominately match via job postings, networks of personal contacts or the public employment agency, all of which help to ameliorate labor market frictions. In this paper we investigate the extent to which these search channels have differential effects on labor market...

This paper employs recently developed econometric models of marginal treatment effects to analyze the relevance of labor market comparative advantage and segmentation in the participation and earnings performance of workers in formal and informal jobs in Argentina. A novel household data set on...

Do firms employing undocumented workers have a competitive advantage? Using administrative data from the state of Georgia, this paper investigates the incidence of undocumented worker employment across firms and how it affects firm survival. Firms are found to engage in herding behavior, being...

This paper examines the role of human capital persistence in explaining long-term development. We exploit variation induced by a state-sponsored settlement policy that attracted a pool of immigrants with higher levels of schooling to particular regions of Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th...

Using German establishment data, this paper examines the relationship between product market competition and the extent of employer provided training. We demonstrate that high product market competition is associated with increased training except when the competition is so severe as to threaten...

Are product market and entry regulation key sources of low employment growth in many European countries? We investigate this question in the context of the French retail trade industry. Since 1974, approval by regional zoning boards has been required for the creation or extension of any large...

Unemployment continues to be one of the major challenges in industrialized societies. Aside from its economic dimensions and societal repercussions, questions concerning the individual experience of unemployment have recently attracted increasing attention. Although many studies have documented...