We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on U.S. local labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization and instrumenting for U.S. imports using changes in Chinese imports by...

We analyze whether regional labor markets are affected by expo- sure to import competition from China. We find negative employment effects for low-skilled workers, and observe that low-skilled workers tend to be pushed into unemployment or leave the labor force altogether. We find no evidence of...

Asylum migration is a major societal challenge in the Western world affecting residents' policy preferences. We analyze the effects of newly hosting asylum seekers in a given municipality on local citizens' preferences in terms of migratory and redistributive policies as well as of support or...

Why do workers change occupations? This paper investigates occupational mobility and its determinants following a large unexpected shock (communism's collapse in 1989.) Our calculations show that from 1989 to 1995 between 35 and 50 percent of Estonian workers changed occupations (classified at...

Increasing the labour market participation of single parents, whether to boost incomes or reduce welfare spending, is a major policy objectives in a number of countries. This paper presents causal evidence on the impact of work search requirements on single parents' transitions into work and...

In this paper, we investigate the use of interactive effect or linear factor models in regional policy evaluation. We contrast treatment effect estimates obtained by Bai (2009)'s least squares method with the popular difference in difference estimates as well as with estimates obtained using...

We extend the benchmark model of Aghion and Blanchard (1994), assuming two segments of the emerging private sector that differ in workers' productivity. We look at the paths of employment, wages, taxes, labor costs and profits during and after the transition, up until the shock is fully...

While unconditional cash transfers have been studied extensively in developing countries, little is known about their effects in a wealthier context. Through a randomized controlled trial, we study the employment effects of a generous and unconditional transfer targeting low-income families in...

Since the early 1990s many empirical studies have been conducted on the impact of international migration on international trade, predominantly from the host country perspective. Because most studies have adopted broadly the same specification, namely a log-linear gravity model of export and...

Within the migration-trade nexus literature, this paper proposes a more carefully defined measure of migration business networks, and quantifies its impact on bilateral trade. Using cross-sectional data and controlling for the overall bilateral stock of migrants, the share of migrants employed...