Using Census Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS) data for 1980, 1990 and 2000, this paper documents a little-noticed feature of U.S. labor markets that there is wide variation in the labor market participation rates and annual work hours of white married women across urban areas. This variation is...

In this paper, we examine the impact of the coal boom in the 1970s and the subsequent coal bust in the 1980s on local labour markets in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. We address two main questions in our analysis. How were non-mining sectors affected by the shocks to the mining...

This paper addresses the selection of smoothing parameters for estimating the average treatment effect on the treated using matching methods. Because precise estimation of the expected counterfactual is particularly important in regions containing the mass of the treated units, we define and...

J31, J71, R23 </AbstractSection> Copyright Black et al.; licensee Springer. 2013

A standard object of empirical analysis in labor economics is a modified Mincer wage function in which an individual's log wage is specified to be a function of education, experience, and an indicator variable identifying race. Researchers hope that estimates from this exercise can be...

We estimate the effects of the quality of the college a student attends on their later earnings using data from a cohort of US college students from the late 1970s and early 1980s. We rely on a linear selection on observables identification strategy, which is justified in our context by a very...