This paper investigates if young internal migrants in the United States experience economic assimilation as they adapt to their new residential location. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the authors examine how the hourly earnings of interstate migrants are affected by...

This paper argues that firms use debt to protect the wealth of shareholders from the threat of unionization. Under U.S. labor law, the firm cannot prohibit its workers from attempting to form a collective bargaining unit. Debt policy offers a method of reducing the impact of this monopoly right...

This article studies the role of the family in determining the skill composition and labor-market experiences of immigrants in the United States. The authors' theoretical framework, based on the assumption that family migration decisions maximize household income, shows that the family...

This article examines empirically the hypothesis that incomplete contracts and resulting opportunistic behavior over the return to sunk assets reduces investment. Union-firm contracts are incomplete because they (1) do not prevent all actions aimed at changing the existing contract; (2) cover a...

During the last couple of decades, courts have intervened in employment relationships by allowing employees to circumvent the workers' compensation liability restrictions. Recent papers point to firms' divesting themselves of operations whose employees handled dangerous substances as a way of...

This paper shows that allowing wealthy individuals to influence the outcome of their trials through the purchase of legal services can be consistent with the optimal penalty literature. Using this analysis, the author reviews some of the advantages and disadvantages of varying the length of jail...

This paper shows that most of the large recent increases in campaign spending for federal and state offices can be explained by higher government spending. This result holds for both federal and state legislative campaigns and gubernatorial races and across many different specifications. The...