Using the New Immigrant Survey, we investigate the impact of immigrant women’s own labor supply prior to migrating and female labor supply in their source country on their labor supply and wages in the US. Women migrating from higher female labor supply countries work more in the US. Most of...

Immigration may impact income distribution both by affecting the skill composition of a country’s residents, and, by changing relative factor supplies, its relative factor prices. We provide some background evidence on compositional factors but focus primarily on factor prices. We first...

Using microdata from the 1994-8 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) for nine countries, we examine the role of cognitive skills in explaining higher wage inequality in the United States. We find that while the greater dispersion of cognitive test scores in the United States plays a part...

Using longitudinal data on individuals from the European Community Household Panel for thirteen countries during 1995-2001, I investigate the wage premium for permanent jobs relative to temporary jobs. For men, the wage premium for a permanent job is lower for older workers and native born...

Using data on 17 OECD countries for 1960-98, this paper studies the impact of unions on public employment incidence, using macrodata and microdata. Macrodata show that greater coverage by centralized collective bargaining institutions raises the public employment share, controlling for country...

I review theories and evidence on labor market policies and institutions in an international context. These include collective bargaining, minimum wages, employment protection laws, unemployment insurance (UI), mandated parental leave, and active labor market policies. Scandinavia and Central...

This paper studies optimal sport league size. League expansion lowers average player quality, reducing fans’ utility in inframarginal locations, while fan utility in new locations rises. Welfare analyses of such expansions must compare these two effects. Using a model where fan demand depends...

We analyze the implications of labor market reforms for an open economy’s human capital investment and future production. A stylized model shows that labor market deregulation can imply more positive current account balances if financial markets are imperfect and labor market institutions not...

“Race-to-the-bottom” deregulation is to be expected when markets operate across the borders of countries that independently choose and enforce labor policies. Less obviously, in pre-crisis EMU reforms of labor market policies were uneven and related to international imbalances. That pattern...

This paper reviews the Italian unemployment experience, analyzing in particular the time-series behavior of unemployment rates along the path that brought Italy into Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union, and their disaggregated structure across geographical and demographic dimensions. High...