During the Great Depression, as today, migrants were accused of taking jobs and crowding relief rolls. At the time, protest concerned internal migrants rather than the foreign born. We investigate the effect of net migration on local labor markets, instrumenting for migrant flows to a...

This paper develops new estimates of flows into and out of unemployment that allow for unobserved heterogeneity across workers as well as direct effects of unemployment duration on unemployment-exit probabilities. Unlike any previous paper in this literature, we develop a complete dynamic...

We exploit the gender-specific components of large-scale labor demand shocks stemming from rising international manufacturing competition to test how shifts in the relative economic stature of young men versus young women affected marriage, fertility and children's living circumstances during...

New longitudinal data on individuals linked across nineteenth century U.S. censuses document the geographic and occupational mobility of more than 75,000 Americans from the 1850s to the 1920s. Together with longitudinal data for more recent years, these data make possible for the first time...

We analyze the Hukou system of permanent registration in China which many believe has supported growing relative inequality over the last 20 years by restraining labour migration both between the countryside and urban areas and between regions and cities. Our aim is to inject economic modelling...

This paper describes measurement of a self-employment rate and the important role the agricultural sector plays in any analysis of the determinants of self-employment. The determinants of the self-employment rate are modeled using a panel of 23 countries for the period 1966-1996. A similar...

We use administrative data linking workers and firms to study employer-to-employer flows. After discussing how to identify such flows in quarterly data, we investigate their basic empirical patterns. We find that the pace of employer-to-employer flows is high, representing about 4 percent of...

This paper proposes an econometric methodology to deal with life cycle earnings and mobility among discrete earnings classes. First, we use panel data on male log earnings to estimate an earnings function with permanent and serially correlated transitory components due to both measured and...

This paper examines the mobility of individuals through the wage and earnings distributions. This is of extreme importance since mobility has a direct implication for the way one views the vast changes in wage and earnings inequality in the United States over the last few decades. The measures...

We explore the dynamics of the agricultural ladder (the progression from laborer to cropper to renter) in the U.S. before 1940 using individual-level data from a survey of farmers conducted in 1938 in Jefferson County, Arkansas. Using information on each individual's complete career history...