The paper links finance theory to labor economics and political economy in the context of migration and immigration policy. Most research treating the impact of immigration has focused on the consequences for employees as measured by wages, earnings, and employment. Less is known about the...

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...

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...

"Using confidential and restricted-access microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that Asian-owned businesses are 16.9 percent less likely to close, 20.6 percent more likely to have profits of at least $10,000, and 27.2 percent more likely to hire employees than white-owned businesses in...

Why do some leaders succeed while others fail? This question is important, but its complexity makes it hard to study systematically. We examine an industry in which there are well-defined objectives, small teams, and exact measures of leaders' characteristics. We show that a strong predictor of...

Can conventional economic analysis help in defining and measuring the success of labor unions? In this paper, a general indicator of union welfare is proposed and particular expressions for the wage and employment objectives of unions are rearranged to derive measures of union success or...

Many development programs are based on short-term interventions, either because of external funding constraints or because it is assumed that impacts persist post program termination ("sustainability"). Using a novel randomized phase-out research method, we provide experimental tests of the...