We analyze a 1960-96 panel of OECD countries to explain why the US moved from relatively high to relatively low unemployment over the last three decades. We find that while macroeconomic and demographic shocks and changing labor market institutions explain a modest portion of this change, the...

This paper deals with the reform to labor market regulation implemented by Chile during the last twenty years. We concentrate on the reform to job security, on the decentralization of the wage bargaining process, and on the reduction in payroll taxes. Our interest is to understand to what extent...

Arguably the most important development in recent decades in US factor markets is the decline in the relative wage of the unskilled. By contrast, in Europe it is undoubtedly the rise and persistence of unemployment. Technology has been identified as a key reason for the rising US wage...

The misuse of alcoholic beverages ('problem drinking') has been demonstrated to result in enormous economic costs; most of these costs have been shown to be reduced productivity in the labor market. The purpose of this paper is to present sound structural estimates of the relationship between...

This paper presents evidence on the relation among incarceration, crime, and the economic incentives to crime, ranging from unemployment to income inequality. It makes three points: 1) The U.S. has incarcerated an extraordinarily high proportion of men of working age overall, and among blacks....

Two key attributes of a job are its wage and its duration. Much has been made of changes in the wage distribution in the 1980s, but little attention has been given to job durations since Hall (1982). We fill this void by examining the temporal evolution of job retention rates in U.S. labor...

This paper analyzes the timing, pace and efficiency of the on- going job reallocation that results from product and process innovation. There are strong reasons why an efficient economy ought to concentrate both job creation and destruction during cyclical downturns, when the opportunity cost of...

There is a broad consensus among US opinion leaders that our economic problem is largely one of failures of international competition -- that trade deficits have eroded our manufacturing base, that inability to sell on world markets has been a major drag on economic growth, and that imports from...

This paper surveys recent research on employment and unemployment in the 1930s. Unlike earlier studies that tended to rely heavily on aggregate time series, the research discussed in this paper focuses on disaggregated data. This shift in focus stems from two factors. First, dissaggregated...