We study the effect of immigration of foreign-trained, registered nurses (RNs) on the employment and wages of US-trained RNs. We use the “area” approach and study effects of immigration in labor markets defined by the state. We find substantial evidence that immigration by foreign-trained...

We study the effect of cultural ties on economic exchange using a novel measure for cultural identity: dialects. We evaluate linguistic micro-data from a unique language survey conducted between 1879 and 1888 in about 45,000 German schools. The recorded geography of dialects comprehensively...

We provide the first analysis of the short-run causal impact of immigrant inflows on native populations at the local labor market level. Using published statistics from the American Community Surveys of 2000–2010, we examine how immigrant inflow shocks to a metropolitan area affect native...

I propose a language theory of labor market segmentation. People of different language origins form separate urban labor submarkets and can switch between submarkets. Two types of wage differentials emerge, namely the Within-Labor-Market Wage Gap and the Within-Language-Group Wage Gap. The...

The impact of the housing crash on household mobility is theoretically ambiguous. Households that have little or negative equity are less likely to move because the proceeds from the sale of the home may not be large enough to pay off the original mortgage and provide a sufficient down payment...

We study the link between self-employment and some salient aspects of entrepreneurship – namely business creation and innovation – in urban and rural labour markets. In order to do so, we combine individual and firm-level data for Britain aggregated at the Travel-to-Work Area level. We find...

This paper discusses nonparametric identification in a model of sorting in which location choices depend on the location choices of other agents as well as prices and exogenous location characteristics. In this model, demand slopes and hence preferences are not identifiable without further...

The unemployment rate in France is roughly 6 percentage points higher for African immigrants than for natives. In the US the unemployment rate is approximately 9 percentage points higher for blacks than for whites. Commute time data indicates that minorities face longer commute times to work,...

Using a simple adverse selection model, we characterize equilibrium when the rich chase the poor. If communities are established by competitive entrepreneurs, the equilibrium exists, is unique, and is efficient. It involves either complete separation, or complete pooling. Different income groups...

This paper documents a little-noticed feature of US labor markets—very large variation in the labor supply of married women across cities. We focus on cross-city differences in commuting times as a potential explanation for this variation. We start with a model in which commuting times...