Our analysis of the market for professional baseball players shows that domestic labor-market restrictions have reduced domestic employment, especially of African-Americans, with employers instead shifting employment overseas. Our theoretical model suggests that, in 1965, the imposition of both...

The United States remains the only OECD nation without national paid maternity leave. This paper exploits changes in paid maternity leave offered by one of the United States’ largest employers, the U.S. Department of Defense. Since 2015, the Marine Corps has shifted their policy from six to 18...

While it is well known that some areas of the United States receive more immigrants than others, less is understood about the extent to which the character of immigration varies as well. There is much broader geographic variation in the skill and demographic composition of immigrants than...

This paper is composed of two parts. First, using international data, I corroborate that union density in the U.S. declined because of asymmetric growth between the union and nonunion sectors. I show union density to increase in countries experiencing strong manufacturing growth, and to decline...

An individual's human capital has a strong influence on earnings. Yet individual, worker-level estimations of earnings rarely include the characteristics of co-workers or detailed firm-level controls. In this paper, we use a unique matched worker's workplace dataset to estimate the effect on own...

This paper provides an overview of the human capital literature focusing on the firm's incentives and disincentives to invest in human capital and subsequently to account for the investments. The evidence suggests human capital investment decisions are intrinsically linked to the success of a...

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed by President William Jefferson Clinton in 1992. Although NAFTA is a trade and tariff initiative it has profound consequences for labor and the U.S. economy. Since its implementation NAFTA has resulted in the permanent elimination of more...

When labor incomes approach subsistence levels, the labor supply curve slopes outward, because the fight for survival mandates households to look for longer work hours in response to falling wage rates. We explore conditions under which near-subsistence scenarios may imply wage traps, labor...

We use de-identified data from California personal income tax returns to measure the frequency and nature of independent contracting and self-employment work in California. We identify this work by the presence of a Schedule C on the tax return and/or the receipt of a Form 1099 information...

This paper considers the impact of education and training on both individual and co-worker pay and establishment performance using the matched employer-employee data in WERS 2004, the panel dataset 1998-2004 and the new Financial Performance Questionnaire. This enables us to assess the impact of...