We examine twin mysteries - the high correlation between Canadian and US unemployment rates and the emergence of a gap between these rates around 1982. We argue that the apparent close relationship between the unemployment rates and the sudden emergence of a gap are statistically spurious,...

It is widely recognized that children who grow up without a biological parent do worse, on average, than other children. However, because having a single parent is highly correlated with many other socioeconomic disadvantages, the negative outcomes might be caused by something beyond the...

When economists analyze a well-conducted RCT or natural experiment and find a statistically significant effect, they conclude the null of no effect is unlikely to be true. But how frequently is this conclusion warranted? The answer depends on the proportion of tested nulls that are true and the...

We consider large, permanent shocks to individual occupations whose arrival date is uncertain. We are motivated by the advent of self-driving trucks, which will dramatically reduce demand for truck drivers. Using a bare-bones overlapping generations model, we examine an occupation facing...

"We analyze a firm's job-assignment and worker-monitoring decisions when workers face occasional crises. Firms prefer to assign good workers to a difficult task and to not employ bad workers. Firms observe failures but only observe successfully resolved crises if they monitor the worker. If...

"In this paper we compare the labor market performance of Israeli students who graduated from one of the leading universities, Hebrew University (HU), with those who graduated from a professional undergraduate college, College of Management Academic Studies (COMAS). Our results support a model...