Jerry Carlino points out that the fortunes of local economies usually depend on a confluence of national, sectoral, and local shocks. That, in turn, raises the question: Does one type of shock systematically buffet local economies more than another? The answer has important implications for both...

In "Agglomeration Economies: The Spark That Ignites a City?" Satyajit Chatterjee discusses his research, which questions this belief. He finds that while agglomeration economies are important, they're not the most important factor in the spatial concentration of employment. The combined effects...

There is now an extensive literature regarding the efficient design of incentive mechanisms in dynamic environments. In this literature, there are no exogenous links across time periods because either privately observed shocks are assumed time independent or past private actions have no...

A classic result in the theory of implicit contract models with asymmetric information is that “underemployment” results if and only if leisure is an inferior good. We introduce household production into the standard implicit contract model and show that we can have underemployment at the...

During periods of slow job growth, some economic analysts look to the Conference Board's help-wanted ad index as a harbinger of future jobs and economic activity.

A large part of the theoretical literature on informal economic activities in developing nations is founded on the assumption that labor markets are segmented. In this paper, we evaluate this premise with data from Argentina's permanent household survey for the 1993-1995 time period. We consider...