This paper compares trends in male and female hourly wage inequality in the United Kingdom and the United States between 1979 and 1998. Our main finding is that the extent and pattern of wage inequality became increasingly similar in the two countries during this period. We attribute this...

Recently, there has been extensive experimental evaluation of reforms of the unemployment insurance (UI) system. The UI experiments can be divided into two main areas: reemployment bonuses and job search programs. The four reemployment bonus experiments offered payments to UI recipients who...

This paper has three goals; first, to place U.S. job growth in international perspective by exploring cross-country differences in employment and population growth. This section finds that the U.S. has managed to absorb added workers -- especially female workers -- into employment at a greater...

The impact of government social and labor market institutions on economic outcomes have generated a great deal of attention by economists and policymakers in the U.S. and in other nations. The theoretical model suggests that there are trade offs of higher levels of economic outcomes with more...

Public employment programs may affect poverty through both the income they provide and their effects on private labor markets. We estimate both effects, exploiting a large-scale experiment randomized across 157 sub-districts (with an average population of 62,500 each) that improved the...

Politicians may use disguised' redistributive policies in order to circumvent opposition to explicit tax-transfer schemes. First, we present a theoretical model that formalizes this hypothesis; then we provide evidence that in US cities, politicians use public employment as such a redistributive...

This paper formulates a model of the youth labor market. At the heart of the model is a minimum wage restriction which causes some youths to become unemployed and prevents others from training. Labor is assumed to be heterogeneous in performance on skilled iobs and is less productive as youths...

We provide a simple explanation for the observation that the variance of job destruction is greater than the variance of job creation: job creation is costlier at the margin than job destruction. As Caballero [2] has argued, asymmetric employment adjustment costs at the establishment level need...

Many countries have policies aimed at creating jobs in depressed areas with high unemployment rates. In standard spatial equilibrium models with perfectly competitive labor and land markets, local job creation efforts are distortionary. We develop a stylized model of frictional local labor...

In recent years, the study of labor supply has occupied the attention of a large number of economists. With the growth in interest in the topic and with the inevitable diversity of economic models and statistical methods proposed by new entrants in the field, the literature has developed its own...