Recent declines in housing prices have focused attention on the relationship between negative housing equity and mortgage default. Theory implies that negative equity is a necessary condition for default, but not a sufficient one. This often-misunderstood result is clearly illustrated in a...

The International Handbook on Teaching and Learning Economics provides a comprehensive resource for instructors and researchers in economics, both new and experienced. This wide-ranging collection is designed to enhance student learning by helping economic educators learn more about course...

The American labor force will be transformed as the twenty-first century unfolds, a change that will confront policymakers and business firms with new challenges and new opportunities. The impending slowdown of labor force growth that will accompany the retirement of the baby boom generation...

During the last few decades, labor markets in advanced economies have become “polarized” as relative labor demand grows for high- and low-skill workers while it declines for middle-skill workers. This paper explores how polarization has interacted with the U.S. business cycle since the late...

To explore the labor-supply trends that will affect economic policymaking in the twenty-first century, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston chose "Labor Supply in the New Century” as the theme for its 52nd Annual Economic Conference held in June 2007. The conference’s six papers and its...

This comment makes three observations about Donohue and Levitt's paper on abortion and crime (Quarterly Journal of Economics 119(1) (2001), 249-275). First, there is a coding mistake in the concluding regressions, which identify abortion's effect on crime by comparing the experiences of...

The 191847 employee records of the Ford Motor Company provide a rare opportunity to study a firm willing to hire black workers when similar firms would not. The evidence suggests that Ford did profit from discrimination elsewhere, but not by paying blacks less than whites. An apparent...

Before World War II, the Ford Motor Company was virtually alone in its hiring of black auto workers. If this was because other employers would not hire blacks, then the terms of employment at Ford might differ for blacks and whites. This paper uses Ford's own personnel data to test for racial...

Research using US manufacturing data finds that job destruction fluctuates more over time than job creation, but some new data indicates that this behavior is not shared in growing sectors, where job creation varies more. An explanation for this finding based on the interaction between...