We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive...

The persistence of U.S. unemployment has risen with each of the last three recessions, raising the specter that future U.S. recessions might look more like the Eurosclerosis experience of the 1980s than traditional V-shaped recoveries of the past. In this paper, we revisit possible explanations...

We show in this paper that important insights into the cyclical behaviour of wages can be gained by dividing (real) average hourly earnings into their straight-time hourly wage and overtime components. Our motivation is based on the idea of employment-contingent contracts. BLS published and...

In the time domain, the observed cyclical behavior of the real wage hides a range of economic influences that give rise to cycles of differing lengths and amplitudes. This may serve to produce a distorted picture of wage cyclicality. Here, we employ frequency domain methods that allow us...

Not only the level of aggregate unemployment but also the properties of its dynamics are an important topic in macroeconomics and labor economics. Several models like e.g. matching models with endogenous job destruction explicitly predict an asymmetric pattern in the evolution of unemployment,...

The belief that immigrants generate beneficial externalities in their host countries, specifically in the form of an increased opportunity and ability of firms to expand their foreign trade, has recently been challenged by George Borjas in Heaven?s Door (1999, p. 97) as having no empirical...

The main findings of this paper are that despite the existence of various affirmative action programs designed to improve the position of women and minorities in public construction, little has changed in the last twenty five years. We present evidence showing that where race conscious...

Living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the United States but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities. These unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities...

Whether siblings of specific birth order perform differently has been a longstanding open empirical question. We use the family tree structure of the PSID to examine two claims found in the literature: whether being early in the birth order implies a distinct educational advantage, and whether...

Despite a longstanding belief that education importantly affects the process of immigrant assimilation, little is known about the relative importance of different mechanisms linking these two processes. This paper explores this issue through an examination of the effects of human capital on one...