Studies of moral hazard in wage insurance programs such as Unemployment Insurance (UI) or Workers Compensation (WC) have demonstrated that higher benefits discourage work, emphasizing the price distortion inherent in benefit provision. Utilizing administrative data linking WC claim records to...

Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry costs or raise...

This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. Using rejected and future applicants to the EZ program as controls, we find...

Previous research has repeatedly found a puzzling one-time drop in consumption at retirement at the mean or median. This study expands upon the previous work by examining these same retirement changes across the entire consumption distribution through the application of quantile regression...

Industrial concentration and market power have been studied extensively at the national scale, in fields ranging from economics and industrial organization to regional science and economic development. At the regional scale, however, industrial structure and firm size relationships have received...

Flows of workers across jobs are a principal mechanism by which labor markets allocate workers to optimize productivity. While these job flows are both large and economically important, they represent a significant gap in available economic statistics. A soon to be released data product from the...

The Census Bureau produces two complementary data products, the American Community Survey (ACS) commuting and workplace data and the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES), which can be used to answer questions about spatial, economic,...

A 2004 report by the author reviewed data from Census 2000 and concluded "There is a substantial gap in median earnings between men and women that is unexplained, even after controlling for work experience (to the extent it can be represented by age and presence of children), education, and...

This paper presents a new approach to the measurement of the effects of spatial mismatch that takes advantage of matched employer-employee administrative data integrated with a person-specific job accessibility measure, as well as demographic and neighborhood characteristics. The basic...