This study provides the first nation-wide analysis of the labor market implications of occupational licensing for the U.S. labor market, using data from a specially designed Gallup survey. We find that in 2006, 29 percent of the workforce was required to hold an occupational license from a...

We show that an occupational license serves as a job market signal, similar to education in the Spence model. In the presence of occupational licensing, we find evidence that firms rely less on observable characteristics such as race and gender in determining employee wages. As a result,...

This paper argues that, since activities that provide political information are complementary with leisure, increased labor market activity should lower turnout, but should do so least in prominent elections where information is ubiquitous. Using official county-level voting data and a variety...

This paper studies the employment and productivity implications of new labor regulations in China. These new restrictions are intended to protect workers' employment conditions by, among other things, increasing firing costs and increasing compensation. We estimate a model of costly labor...

We study the extent to which manufacturing decline and local housing booms contributed to changes in labor market outcomes during the 2000s, focusing primarily on the distributional consequences across geographical areas and demographic groups. Using a local labor markets design, we estimate...

We study whether cultural attitudes towards gender, the young, and leisure are significant determinants of the evolution over time of the employment rates of women and of the young, and of hours worked in OECD countries. Beyond controlling for a larger menu of policies, institutions and...

Using weekly administrative payroll data from the largest U.S. payroll processing company, we measure the evolution of the U.S. labor market during the first four months of the global COVID-19 pandemic. After aggregate employment fell by 21 percent through late-April, employment rebounded...

Over the last half century, U.S. wage growth stagnated, wage inequality rose, and the labor-force participation rate of prime-age men steadily declined. In this article, we examine these labor market trends, focusing on outcomes for males without a college education. Though wages and...

We adopt a general equilibrium approach in order to measure the effects of recent immigration on the Western German labor market, looking at both wage and employment effects. Using the Regional File of the IAB Employment Subsample for the period 1987-2001, we find that the substantial...

We study a two-country two-sector model of international trade in which one sector produces homogeneous products while the other produces differentiated products. The differentiated-product industry has firm heterogeneity, monopolistic competition, search and matching in its labor market, and...