Ghost towns dot the West of the United States. These cities boomed for a period and then, for various reasons, fell into a process of decline and have shrunk to a small fraction of their former population. Are there ghost countries—countries that, if there were population mobility, would only...

The extremely fragile balance of the Romanian labour market is severely affected by the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and by the sudden and almost general deterioration of the macroeconomic context and the business environment. The present study aims to argue that, in times of crisis,...

Between 2004 and 2018, the spread of wages in Mexico's private labor sector remained stable. Nonetheless, the underlying factors behind salary dispersion underwent significant shifts. To uncover these changes, we analyze an employer-employee dataset comprising the near-universe of Mexico's...

One of the distinguishing features of the Great Recession and its aftermath has been the spike in the number of individuals experiencing long-duration unemployment spells, defined as lasting more than 26 weeks. This paper analyzes the effect of unemployment duration on individual's future...

We assess the role of banks in the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a large and unprecedented smallbusiness support program instituted as a response to the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. In 2020, the PPP administered more than $525 billion in loans and grants to small businesses through...

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was a large and unprecedented small-business support program that allocated $800 billion in loans and grants to small businesses following the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. This paper explores the optimal allocation of funds across firms and the distortions...

This paper studies the labour force participation in Mexico between 2005 and 2018 at the aggregate level. While the ageing of the labour force produced modest reductions in the participation rate, changes in the educational level countervailed these effects for the period of study. In...

Based on the methodology proposed by Frey and Osborne (2017), we use their estimates for the probability of automation of occupations together with household survey data on the occupational distribution of employment to provide a risk assessment for the threat that automation may pose to the...

Economists have studied the potential effects of shifts in the age distribution on the unemployment rate for more than 50 years. Most of this analysis uses a "shift-share" method, which assumes that the demographic structure has no indirect effects on age-specific unemployment rates. This paper...

This article offers the first empirical evidence that labor force exit rates rise when workers' relative earnings fall. The model takes into account that a job not only provides economic security but also affirms a worker's social status, which is tied to their relative position in the labor...