The past half-century has seen economic research become increasingly empirical, while the nature of empirical economic research has also changed. In the 1960s and 1970s, an empirical economist's typical mission was to “explain” economic variables like wages or GDP growth. Applied...

We study the causal connection between trade and development using one of the earliest massive trade expansions: the first systematic crossing of open seas in the Mediterranean during the time of the Phoenicians. We construct a measure of connectedness along the shores of the sea. This...

Germany has experienced a high and rising rate of anti-foreigner violence during the early 1990s. To analyze the determinants of crime against foreigners we assembled a new data set on the number and nature of such crimes at the county level based on newspaper reports. We find significant...

In this paper, we survey non-competitive theories of training. With competitive labor markets, firms never pay for investments in general training, whereas when labor markets are imperfect, firm-sponsored training arises as an equilibrium phenomenon. We discuss a variety of evidence which...

There is a well-established positive correlation between life-satisfaction measures and income in individual level cross-sectional data. This paper attempts to provide some evidence on whether this correlation reflects causality running from money to happiness. I use industry wage differentials...

Many literatures investigate the causal impact of income on economic outcomes, for example in the context of intergenerational transmission or well-being and health. Some studies have proposed to use employer wage differentials and in particular industry affiliation as an instrument for income....

This essay reviews progress in empirical economics since Leamer's (1983) critique. Leamer highlighted the benefits of sensitivity analysis, a procedure in which researchers show how their results change with changes in specification or functional form. Sensitivity analysis has had a salutary but...

Becker's theory of human capital predicts that minimum wages should reduce training investments for affected workers, because they prevent these workers from taking wage cuts necessary to finance training. We show that when the assumption of perfectly competitive labor markets underlying this...

Unions compress the wage distribution among workers covered by union contracts. We" ask whether unions also have an effect on the managers of unionized firms. To this end we" collected and assembled data on unionization and managerial pay within firms and industries in" the U.S. and across...

We exploit the changes in the distribution of family income to estimate the effect of parental resources on college education. Our strategy exploits the fact that families at the bottom of the income distribution were much poorer in the 1990s than they were in the 1970s, while the opposite is...