The paper analyzes the effects of tighter border control on the illegal crossing market between Mexico and the United States. Combining panel data on illegal migrants with enforcement statistics, the effects of enforcement are found to be moderate: prices of border smugglers ('coyotes')...

Education yields substantial non-monetary benefits, but the size of these gains is still debated. Previous studies, for example, report contradictory effects of education and compulsory schooling on mortality - ranging from zero to large mortality reductions. Using data from 19 compulsory...

Previous studies report a wide range of estimates for how female labor supply responds to childcare prices. We shed new light on this question using a reform that raised the prices of public daycare. Parents respond by reducing public daycare and increasing childcare at home. Parents also reduce...

Political and economic transition is often blamed for Russia's 40 percent surge in deaths between 1990 and 1994. Highlighting that increases in mortality occurred primarily among alcohol-related causes and among working-age men (the heaviest drinkers), this paper investigates an alternative...

Political and economic transition is often blamed for Russia's 40% surge in deaths between 1990 and 1994 (the "Russian Mortality Crisis"). Highlighting that increases in mortality occurred primarily among alcohol related causes and among working-age men (the heaviest drinkers), this paper...

Immigrants in many countries have lower employment rates and lower earnings than natives. In this paper, we ask whether a more liberal access to citizenship can improve the economic integration of immigrants. Our analysis relies on two major immigration reforms in Germany, a country with a...

Immigrants in many countries have lower employment rates and lower earnings than natives. We study whether a more liberal access to citizenship improves the economic integration of immigrants. Our analysis relies on two major immigration reforms in Germany, a country with a weak record of...

This article studies how portable skills accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data on tasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task-specific human capital to measure empirically the transferability of skills across occupations. Our results on occupational mobility and...

We study how a negative labor market shock like job loss generates health spillovers in couples. Using administrative data of all workers and firms matched to mortality and patient records, we document that male job displacement increases the mortality risk for both the man and his partner. For...