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...

This paper examines the response of employment and wages in the US oil and gas field services industry to changes in the price of crude petroleum using a time series of quarterly data spanning the period 1972-2002. I find that labor quickly reallocates across sectors in response to price shocks...

This paper evaluates the impact of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ) program on neighborhood level labor and housing market outcomes over the period 1994-2000. Using four decades of Census data in conjunction with information on the proposed boundaries of rejected EZs, we find...

Sequential auction models of labour market competition predict that the wages required to successfully poach a worker from a rival employer will depend on the productivities of both the poached and the poaching firms. We develop a theoretically grounded extension of the two-way fixed effects...

Structural econometric methods are often criticized for being sensitive to functional form assumptions. We study parametric estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE) derived from a widely used class of latent threshold crossing models and show they yield LATE estimates...