About two weeks prior to each FOMC meeting, the Federal Reserve releases a description of economic activity in a document called the Beige Book. The authors examine whether the descriptive content of the Beige Book affects asset prices. The results indicate that more positive Beige Book reports...

In standard cross-sectional wage regressions, married men appear to earn 10 to 20 percent more than comparable never-married men. One proposed explanation for this male marriage premium is that men may be selected into marriage on the basis of characteristics valued by employers as well as by...

Whether immigrants are positively or negatively self-selected is much disputed. Whereas most previous studies have addressed this question by comparing the wages of immigrants to those of U.S. natives, this analysis uses occupation to examine the skill level of immigrants. Data on the...

Using Displaced Worker Survey data, this paper examines changes in the age distribution of displaced workers during the 1983–87 and 1993–97 periods. Older workers comprised a significantly larger fraction of displaced workers during the later period. Potential explanations for this...

Although many studies have examined whether job stability and security have declined over time, the role of technology in job turnover has received little attention. This analysis examines the relationship between the likelihood that a worker remains at the same job for two years and various...

The goal of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was to end the dependency of needy parents on government benefits, in part by promoting marriage; the pre-reform welfare system was widely believed to discourage marriage because it primarily provided...

This paper examines whether allowing certain undocumented immigrants to legalize their status leads to additional illegal immigration. The authors focus on the effects of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to over three million undocumented immigrants. They find...

This study examines whether there are differences in men’s and women’s use of computers and the Internet in the United States and Japan and how any such gender gaps have changed over time. The authors focus on these two countries because information technology is widely used in both, but...

Workers with limited English skills may suffer adverse effects in the labor market when states declare English the official language. If employers view official English laws as allowing or requiring them to adopt workplace English-only rules that lower the demand for limited-English-proficient...

Previous research has reached mixed conclusions about whether higher levels of immigration reduce the wages of natives. This paper reexamines this question using data from the Current Population Survey and the Immigration and Naturalization Service and focuses on differential effects by skill...