In this paper, I examine the spatial correlation of wages, employment, and consumer purchasing power across U.S. counties to see whether regional product-market linkages contribute to spatial agglomeration. First, I estimate a simple market-potential function, which is a reduced form for several...

In this paper, we examine the impact of government enforcement of the U.S.-Mexico border on wages in the border regions of the United States and Mexico. The U.S. Border Patrol polices U.S. boundaries, seeking to apprehend any individual attempting to enter the United States illegally. These...

This paper addresses an issue that has received a great deal of attention in recent years, both from international trade economists and from labor economists: What has caused the relative wage of skilled labor compared to unskilled labor in the United States to increase through the 1980s and...

This paper examines the choice of policies to redistribute income in response to an increase in inequality caused by a rise in the differential wage paid to skilled labor compared to unskilled labor. The main issue is whether the appropriate policy response depends on the cause of the increased...

This paper examines the usefulness of a result of Deardorff and Staiger (1988), who showed that the factor content of trade can be interpreted under certain assumptions as indicating the nature of the factor price adjustments that can, in a specified sense, be attributed to that trade. This...