I have worried about the talk, in recent times, that immigrants hurt the wages of native workers in the host nation. If so, that is not a good outcome. Why should native workers lose out to immigrants? To come to terms with my worry, I began to experiment with a classic dataset on immigrants and...

Low unionization rates, a falling real federal minimum wage, and prevalent non-competes characterize low-wage jobs in the United States and contribute to growing inequality. In recent years, a number of private employers have opted to institute or raise company-wide minimum wages for their...

We study the role of institutions in affecting the labor market impacts of immigration using a cross-country meta-analysis approach. To accomplish this, we gather information on 1,030 previously estimated wage effects and 432 employment effects of immigration from 61 academic studies covering 18...

This paper explores the impact of undocumented as opposed to documented immigration in a model featuring search frictions and non-random hiring that is consistent with novel empirical evidence presented. In this framework, undocumented immigrants' wages are the lowest of all workers due to their...

This study examines the extent and influence of occupational licensing in the U.S. using a specially designed national labor force survey. Specifically, we provide new ways of measuring occupational licensing and consider what types of regulatory requirements and what level of government...

To what extent do different firms follow different wage policies? How do such policies affect worker mobility between firms, and what are the effects of different wage bargaining regimes? The empirical branch of personnel economics has long been hampered by a lack of representative data sets....

Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers' beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...

Little is known about how workers update expectations about job search and earnings when exposed to labor market news. To identify the impact of news on expectations, I exploit Foxconn's unexpected announcement to build a manufacturing plant in Racine County. Exposure to positive news leads to...

Does the labor market place wage premia on jobs that involve physical strain, job insecurity or bad regulation of hours? This paper derives bounds on the monetary returns to these job disamenities in the West German labor market. We show that in a market with dispersion in both job...

Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers' beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...