The importance of using natural experiments and experimental data in economic research has long been recognized. Yet, it is only in recent years that these approaches have become an integral part of the economist's analytical toolbox, thanks to the efforts of Meyer, Card, Peters, Krueger,...

This note presents and tests a general model to help explain why the demand for labor adapts to the availability of labor. In particular, we postulate that the cost of hiring declines with a growth in available labor for two reasons: (1) individuals seeking employment would be coming to...

The initial earnings of U.S. immigrants vary enormously by country of origin. Via three interrelated analyses, we show earnings convergence across source countries with time in the United States. Human-capital theory plausibly explains the inverse relationship between initial earnings and...

Using historical, longitudinal data on individuals, we track the earnings of immigrant and U.S.-born women. Following individuals, instead of synthetic cohorts, avoids biases in earnings-growth estimates caused by compositional changes in the cohorts that are followed. The historical data...

In this paper, I analyze educational outcomes for second generation immigrants and compare them to those of natives. I use a dynamic structural model and focus on transition paths from school to work for youths in Canada and the U.S. Using data extracted from the 1997 National Longitudinal...

In this paper, we formulate and estimate an economic model of labor supply and welfare participation. The model is estimated on data on single men from Quebec drawn from the 1986 Canadian Census. Budget sets for each work-welfare combination - accounting for income taxes, tax credits and welfare...

In this paper, we develop and estimate a structural, dynamic model of schooling decisions using data extracted from the Canadian Youth in Transition Survey (YITS). The model incorporates forward-looking behavior and expectations about future benefits from investing in education. The results...

Using a dynamic skill accumulation model of schooling and labor supply with learning-by-doing, we decompose early life-cycle wage growth of U.S. white males into four main sources: education, hours worked, cognitive skills (AFQT scores) and unobserved heterogeneity, and evaluate the effect of...