The initial earnings of U.S. immigrants vary enormously by country of origin. Via three interrelated analyses, we show earnings convergence across source countries with time in the United States. Human-capital theory plausibly explains the inverse relationship between initial earnings and...

In empirical research it is common practice to use sensible rules of thumb for cleaning data. Measurement error is often the justification for removing (trimming) or recoding (winsorizing) observations whose values lie outside a specified range. We consider a general measurement error process...

The IAB employment subsample is now available for researchers in a third, anonymised version. Following the so-called basic file and the regional file from the IAB employment subsample, which encompassed the years 1975 to 1990, the actualized version of the basic file covers now the years 1975...

Data from a range of different environments indicate that the incidence of death is not randomly distributed across families but, rather, that there is a clustering of death amongst siblings. A natural explanation of this would be that there are (observed or unobserved) differences across...

This study examines high school effects on the labor market success of young adults, above and beyond individual and family characteristics. We employ data from two longitudinal, nationally probability samples: the National Longitudinal Study and the High School and Beyond study and the 5th and...

This paper proposes an extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition from two to a continuum of comparison groups. The proposed decomposition is then estimated for the case of racial wage differences in urban Peru, exploiting a novel data set that allows the capturing of mestizaje (racial mixtures).

The response of governments to the COVID-19 outbreak was foremost oriented to two objectives: saving lives and limiting economic losses. However, the effectiveness and success factors of interventions were unknown ex-ante. This study aims to shed light on the drivers of countries' performances...

The importance of using natural experiments and experimental data in economic research has long been recognized. Yet, it is only in recent years that these approaches have become an integral part of the economist's analytical toolbox, thanks to the efforts of Meyer, Card, Peters, Krueger,...

Two radically different descriptions of immigrant earnings trajectories in the U.S. have emerged. One asserts that immigrant men following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act have low initial earnings and high earnings growth. Another asserts that post-1965 immigrants have low initial...

This paper proposes an extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition from two to a continuum of comparison groups. The proposed decomposition is then estimated for the case of racial wage differences in urban Peru, exploiting a novel data set that allows the capturing of mestizaje (racial...