In contrast to their relative standing in today's labor market, in 1960 U.S.-born men in all Asian groups earned substantially less than comparable whites. We explore explanations for the wage gap and find that all of the variables that might plausibly account for it, such as Asian/white...

We examined the liability-of-foreignness (LOF) hypothesis for immigrant and native job seekers by analyzing a national dataset that tracks their use of job-search methods and their associated job outcomes in the Canadian labor market. To our knowledge this is the first empirical test of LOF at...

This paper proposes a dynamic politico-economic theory of debt, government finance and expenditure. Agents have preferences over a private and government-provided public good, financed through labour taxation. Subsequent generations of voters choose taxation, government expenditure and debt...

African countries have accumulated substantial foreign currency reserves in recent years, mostly from higher commodity exports as well as aid flows. In the context of macroeconomic stabilization, which remains at the forefront of national economic policymaking and aid conditionality, African...

In a seminal paper Gibbons and Katz (1991; GK) develop and empirically test an asymmetric information model of the labor market. The model predicts that wage losses following displacement should be larger for layoffs than for plant closings, which was borne out by data from the Displaced Workers...

A variety of evidence points to significant growth in domestic contracting out over the last two decades, yet the phenomenon is not well documented. In this paper, we pull together data from various sources to shed light on the extent of and trends in domestic outsourcing, the occupations in...

We present a model of neighborhood effects in wage payment delays. Positive feedback arises because each employer's arrears affect the late payment costs faced by other firms in the same local labor market, resulting in a strategic complementarity in the practice. The model is estimated on panel...

Originally presented as an empirical regularity, a variety of microeconomic derivations of the Phillips tradeoff between inflation and real output have been developed. Since these new Phillips curve models are expressed in terms of unobserved variables and expectations, we develop estimates of...

A large body research shows a positive relationship between wealth and entrepreneurship and interprets the relationship as providing evidence of liquidity constraints. Recently, however, the liquidity constraint interpretation has been challenged because of the finding that the relationship...