Historically coal has offered both benefits and costs to urban areas. Benefits include coal's role in fueling industry and thus employment. The primary costs are air pollution and its impact on human health. This paper starts by using a Rosen-Roback style model to examine how differences in...

This paper evaluates the impact of public employment on private sector activity using the relocation of the German federal government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variation. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple economic...

Most countries exhibit large and persistent geographical differences in wages, income and unemployment rates. A growing class of "place based" policies attempt to address these differences through public investments and subsidies that target disadvantaged neighborhoods, cities or regions. Place...

This paper identifies several distortions which create barriers to entrepreneurship. First, in addition to the innate entry cost, there are entry costs caused by regulation. Second, union wage policies raise the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship. Third, inefficiencies in the transmission of...

Often, minimum wage laws are decided at the state or regional level, and even when not, federal level increases are only binding in certain states. This has been used in previous literature to evaluate the effects of minimum wages on earnings and employment levels. This paper introduces a...

Patterns of informal care are documented throughout the day with Dutch time use diary data. The diary data enable us to identify a, so far overlooked, source of opportunity costs of informal care, i.e. the necessity to perform particular tasks of informal care at specific moments of the day....

There is no robust empirical support for the effect of financial incentives on the decision to work in self-employment rather than as a wage earner. In the literature, this is seen as a puzzle. We offer a focus on the opportunity cost, i.e. the wages given up as an employee. Information on...

The time devoted to housework in couple households is substantial. Research on intrahousehold time allocations has generally assumed that housework is a necessary evil and that the partner with the lower opportunity cost of time in the market will devote more time to home production. In reality,...

The explicit costs of raising a child have grown over the past several decades. Less well understood are the implicit costs of having a child, and how they have changed over time. In this paper we use longitudinal administrative data from over 70,000 individuals in the Synthetic SIPP Beta to...