Using unique matched employer-employee data from China, we discover that migrant workers in the manufacturing industry who are proficient in the local dialect earn lower wages than those who are not. We also find that workers with better dialect skills are more likely to settle for lower wages...

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the federal government’s largest cash assistance program for working families. This research aims to understand the extent to which the EITC affects black and white households differently. The empirical analysis shows that after the EITC expansion, single...

The traditional literature treat wage dispersion and firm dynamics, which are closely connected to each other, in isolation. This paper delivers a unified treatment to wage dispersion and firm-size distribution by developing a real-option-theoretic approach. The model is tractable with analytic...