Recent papers have found that often immigrants are overqualified relative to native-born workers when comparing an individual’s education to the ‘average’ education in their occupation. We show that these results are sensitive to differences in the education distribution between immigrants...

A number of recent papers have found that non-cognitive skills and in particular, locus of control (LoC), are important predictors of success in life in terms of both traditional labor market and socioeconomic outcomes, and measures of subjective wellbeing. Specifically, the literature has found...

As in other OECD countries, women in New Zealand earn substantially less than men with similar observable characteristics. In this paper, we use a decade of annual wage and productivity data from New Zealand's Linked Employer-Employee Database to examine different explanations for this gender...

Much has been written about politicians' preferences for electoral systems, yet little is known about the preferences of voters. In 1993, New Zealand had a binding electoral referendum on the same day as the general election where voters chose between keeping a single plurality system (First...

This paper examines the amenity value of legalized marijuana by analyzing the impact of marijuana legalization on migration to Colorado. Colorado is the pioneering state in this area having legalized medical marijuana in 2000 and recreational marijuana in 2012. We test whether potential migrants...

This paper exploits the reduction in the legal drinking age in New Zealand from 20 to 18 to study the dynamics of youth risk taking. Using administrative data on the universe of road accidents over a fifteen year period spanning the law change, we undertake three complimentary analyses to...