Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Sample Selection Bias And The Nature Of Unemployment, Joshua David Angrist

Honors Papers

The most disturbing and difficult empirical problems of labor economics revolve around the absence of crucial information; the wage an unemployed person would receive if he or she were working. The most controversial policy problem of labor economics is embodied in the question; when is unemployment a problem? The goal of this paper is to propose a methodology for studying the first problem that sheds some light on the second.