International Labor Economics

Abstract

I argue for increased reliance on non-U.S. data and policy evaluations to understand basic labor- market parameters and to predict the effects of changes in U.S. labor-market policies. Foreign experiences generate exogenous shocks to labor costs that create unusual opportunities to measure impacts on labor demand. Foreign policies often provide more variation in the underlying parameters in systems that are often structured like their American counterparts. Foreign data sets are often larger and better suited to inferring behavior. An examination of empirical studies in labor economics shows the effect of the location of the author, data set and journal on the subsequent impact of the research on other scholars.