Icelandic fishers operate on a higher wage rate than they might have attained in another profession. There could be a number of reasons for this. Fishers are more likely to be full-time workers than the average worker in the economy. Fishers are away from home and they experience more...

Housing wealth is a large component of total wealth and plays an important role in aggregate business cycles. In this paper, we explore data on real house price cycles at the aggregate level and city level for the United States and Canada. Using a panel of 137 cities, we examine the duration,...

In an empirical analysis, considering 236 U.S. cities in the period 1980-1990, we document a strong positive correlation between local supply of skills and their return. In SMSA's where the average education of workers is high the education premium is also high. This is true both considering the...

Living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the United States but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities. These unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities...

Persistent productivity gains to rural-urban migrants have been documented by a number of researchers. One interpretation of this result is that individuals learn higher value skills in cities than they would have learned in less dense areas. Another explanation for this result, however, is that...

We develop a standard search-matching model in which mobility costs are so high that it is too costly for workers to relocate when a change in their employment status occurs. We show that, in equilibrium, wages increase with distance to jobs and commuting costs because firms need to compensate...

In this paper I review what we have learned about living wage laws and their impacts on the wages, employment and poverty rates of low-wage workers. I review the characteristics of these laws and where they have been implemented to date, and what economic theory tells us about their likely...

Recent theories of economic growth have stressed the role of externalities in generating growth. Using data from the Census Bureau that tracks all employers in the whole U.S. private sector economy, we examine the impact of these externalities, as measured by entrepreneurial activity, on...

It has been well documented that employment outcomes often differ considerably across areas. This paper examines the extent to which the local human capital level, measured as the share of prime age adults with a college degree, has positive external effects on labor force participation and...