Every year, thousands of ex-convicts in the United States undergo the challenging process of reentering society. Contact with the criminal justice system can disrupt critical developmental experiences for young adults, often resulting in these individuals continuing a life of crime. The purpose of this study is to determine if employment is an effective way for young adults to re-transition int...

Little is known about how health insurance affects labor market decisions for young adults. This is despite the fact that expanding coverage for people in their early 20s is an important component of the Affordable Care Act. This paper studies how having an outside source of health insurance affects wages by using variation in health insurance access that comes from states extending dependent c...

The HIV epidemic has dramatically decreased labor supply among prime-age adults in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using within-country variation in regional HIV prevalence and a synthetic panel, I find that HIV significantly increases the capital-labor ratio in urban manufacturing firms. The impact of HIV on average wages is positive but imprecisely estimated. In contrast, HIV has a large positive impact ...

as the analytical framework. Despite the many estimates presented in the literature, there is little agreement on a point estimate of the gross effect of the wage rate on weekly hours of work, except that it is generally negative (i.e., the income effect dominates).2 The fact that the wage elasticity is negative has been used to explain the secular decline of hours of work and is important in c...

In this paper we study whether location-speci...c price variation likely a¤ects statistical inference and theoretical interpretation in the empirical implementation of human capital earnings functions. We demonstrate, in a model of local labor markets, that the “return to schooling” is a constant across locations if and only if preferences are homothetic— a special case that seems unlikely to g...

We explore the implications of labour demand constraints on the propensity to experience poverty. Since these constraints can manifest themselves in terms of both prices and quantities, we focus particularly on the relative contributions of underemployment and underpayment. Our analysis suggests that there has been a significant increase in working poverty in Britain over the period 1985-1996, ...

This paper applies semiparametric regression models to shed light on the relationship between body weight and labor market outcomes in Germany. We find conclusive evidence that these relationships are poorly described by linear or quadratic OLS specifications. Women's wages and employment probabilities do not follow a linear relationship and are highest at a body weight far below the clinical t...

Less than 20 percent of all people work in nonmetropolitan areas in the United States, and their average hourly wage is over $3 less than that of people in metropolitan areas. However, by occupation, the concentration of workers and their wages in nonmetropolitan areas vary considerably from the national averages. Overall average salaries are higher in metropolitan areas than in nonmetropolitan...

[Excerpt] Dunbabin takes issue with us on the question of whether and by how much the agricultural workers' movement led by Joseph Arch raised agricultural wages in the early 1870s. A number of authors have speculated on what the wage effect might have been, but these speculations have rarely been based on more than a cursory examination of agricultural wage data and they have not been able to ...