The natural rate of unemployment changes over time as a result of structural shifts in the distribution of employment across sectors. This paper develops a Kalman filtering approach to measuring these structural shifts or turbulence. The technique is useful in distinguishing those changes in...

Despite their complexity, existing policy evaluation methods ignore many features of the real world that are pertinent for welfare analysis of trade policy. The main limitation of these technics is that they are static, which means they ignore important dynamic consequences of trade...

This paper uses 2000 U.S. Census data to study the determinants of self-employment decisions among immigrants. It outlines a theoretical framework for analyzing the role of ethnic enclaves in the self-employment decision of immigrants that captures nuances involved in the interaction between...

This paper studies how producers’ idiosyncratic risks affect an industry’s aggregate dynamics in an environment where certainty equivalence fails. In the model, producers can place workers in two types of jobs, organized and temporary. Workers are less productive in temporary jobs, but...

I consider the estimation of linear regression models when the independent variables are measured with errors whose variances differ across observations, a situation that arises, for example, when the explanatory variables in a regression model are estimates of population parameters based on...

Based on findings from a survey of Black Households, this paper highlights socioeconomic and demographic factors that many influence the utilization of different financial markets. In addition, it discusses the potentially important role that informal financial networks can play in racial/ethnic...