Since 1986 the United States has made considerable efforts to curb illegal immigration. This has resulted in an increase in migration costs for undocumented immigrants. More stringent border enforcement either deters potential illegal immigrants from coming to the U.S., or moves the point of...

Both educational attainment and skills, as measured in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), are high in Sweden. They are not perfect substitutes, but both are to some degree necessary for successfully integrating in the Swedish labour market. This paper describes the distribution of...

Prior empirical research shows that acculturation in the host country might be positively related to immigrants? labor market outcomes. However, whether acculturation helps highly educated immigrants in the labor market is in question, as they have completed a significant fraction of human...

This paper explores the consequences of grouping workers into diverse divisions on the performance of employees using a dataset containing the detailed personnel records of a large U.S. firm from 1989-1994. In particular, I examine the effects of demographic dissimilarity among co-workers,...

We show that a calibrated dynamic skill accumulation model allowing for comparative advantages, can explain the weak (or negative) effects of schooling on productivity that have been recently reported (i) in the micro literature on compulsory schooling, ii) in the micro literature on estimating...

The first-half of the 20th century is characterized by mass migration from Europe to the US and rapid technological progress. Exploiting national immigration policy changes together with historical settlement patterns of immigrants' across US counties, I estimate the effect of skilled...

Using a dynamic skill accumulation model of schooling and labor supply with learning-by-doing, we decompose early life-cycle wage growth of U.S. white males into four main sources: education, hours worked, cognitive skills (AFQT scores) and unobserved heterogeneity, and evaluate the effect of...

We reevaluate the hypothesis and empirical result that ethnic civil wars lead to higher skilled emigration (Bang and Mitra, 2013). We develop a simple conceptual framework that predicts contrasting results depending upon if the economy is assumed to be agglomerating in skilled labor or...

We model the joint distribution of (i) individual education trajectories, defined by the allocation of time (semesters) between various combinations of school enrollment with different labor supply modalities and periods of school interruption devoted either to employment or home production and...

This paper examines whether management changes caused by the entry of the baby boom into the workforce explain the US productivity slowdown in the 1970s and resurgence in the 1990s. Lucas (78) suggests that the quality of managers plays a significant role in determining output. If there is...