Being able to read and write is one of the most important skills in modern economies. Literacy frequently is a prerequisite for employment and its relevance for productivity and wages is magnified by the fact that it is only through literacy that many other skills become usable. More so than for...

We develop an on-the-job search model in which immigrants search for jobs through formal channels or networks, and the quality of job offers differs across search methods. The model predicts networks unambiguously lead to a larger share of network jobs in job-to-job transitions, whereas the...

Standard analysis of racial inequality incorporates racial classification as an exogenous binary variable. This approach obfuscates the importance of racial self-identity and clouds our ability to understand the relative importance of unobserved productivity-linked attributes versus market...

This paper contrasts the explanatory power of the mono-cultural and diversity models of racial disparity. The mono-cultural model ignores nativity and ethnic differences among African Americans. The diversity model assumes that culture affects both intra- and interracial labor market disparity....

This paper examines the employment effects of an increase in labor supply using the politically-driven exodus of ethnic Turks from Bulgaria into Turkey in 1989. The strong involvement of the Turkish state in the settlement of earlier waves of repatriates provides us a strong source of exogenous...

Civil war in Syria, which started in March 2011, has led to a massive wave of forced immigration from the Northern Syria to the Southeastern regions of Turkey. This paper exploits this natural experiment to estimate the impact of Syrian refugees on the labor market outcomes of natives in Turkey....