Adam Smith alleged that employers sometimes secretly collude to reduce labor earnings. This paper examines an important case of such behavior: illegal no-poaching agreements through which information-technology companies agreed not to compete for each other's workers. Exploiting the plausibly...

How does employer market power affect workers? We compute the concentration of new hires by occupation and commuting zone in France using linked employer-employee data. Using instrumental variables with worker and firm fixed effects, we find that a 10% increase in labor market concentration...

We evaluate the impact of the Washington State Attorney General's enforcement campaign against employee no-poaching clauses in franchising contracts, which unfolded from 2018 through early 2020. Implementing a staggered difference-in-differences research design using Burning Glass Technologies...

We evaluate the effect of perhaps the largest exogenous decline in a state's incarceration rate in U.S. history on local crime rates. We assess the effects of a recent reform in California that caused a sharp and permanent reduction in the state's incarceration rate. We exploit the large...

We use rich microdata on bank robberies to estimate individual-level disutilities of imprisonment. The identification rests on the money versus apprehension trade-off that robbers face inside the bank when deciding whether to leave or collect money for an additional minute. The distribution of...

We analyze the disparate effects of a recent California sentencing reform on the arrest, booking, and incarceration rates experienced by California residents from different racial and ethnic groups. In November 2014 California voters passed state proposition 47 that redefined a series of felony...

We evaluate whether California's state proposition 47 impacted state violent and property crime rates. Passed by the voters in November 2014, the proposition redefined many less serious property and drug offenses that in the past could be charged as either a felony or misdemeanor to straight...

We estimate the "incapacitation effect" on crime using variation in Italian prison population driven by eight collective pardons passed between 1962 and 1995. The prison releases are sudden – within one day –, very large – up to 35 percent of the entire prison population – and happen...

This note investigates the effects of the education level, product market rigidities andemployment protection legislation on growth. It exploits macro-panel data for OECDcountries...

While trade unions have been studied in detail, there is virtually no economics research on employer associations (EAs), their counterparts in many countries. Here we argue that EAs are important economic agents as they provide sectoral public goods such as collective bargaining, training, and...