Economic Liberalization with Rising Segmentation in China's Urban Labor Market*

Economic Liberalization and Rising College Premiums in Mexico: A Reinterpretation

— Mexico’s college premium rose in the 1990s. Studies employing structural decomposition analyses treat the college premium as the relative price of “skilled” to “unskilled” workers. They find that reallocations of labor across industries and occupations cannot account for rising college premiums, and often attribute them to widely observed trade-induced increases in skills demand within the ma...

Adjusting to Trade Liberalization: Reallocation and Labor Market Policies

Labor market responses to trade liberalization typically exhibit a slow reallocation of labor across industries, large costs for displaced workers, and a disproportionate adjustment burden for older workers. To explain these features and analyze alternative policies, I develop a two-sector small open economy model with overlapping generations, frictional labor markets, and sector-specific human...

Liberalization and Market Segmentation in the Natural Gas Industry

This paper examines competition in the natural gas industry, with a reference to the recent European liberalization plans. Each ̄rm, endowed with a (limited) low cost capacity, participates in a decentralized market where it contracts directly with the individual customers paying each time a ̄xed fee. Contracting costs and price competition make entry in the same submarkets unpro t̄able, while l...

Economic Fluctuations in a Labor Market with Heterogeneous Agents

The Labor Market Effects of Rising Health Insurance Premiums

We estimate the effect of rising health insurance premiums on wages, employment, and the distribution of part-time and full-time work using variation in medical malpractice payments driven by the recent “medical malpractice crisis.” We estimate that a 10% increase in health insurance premiums reduces the aggregate probability of being employed by 1.2 percentage points, reduces hours worked by 2...