Since U.S. economic growth began to slow in 2006, both the Bush and Obama Administrations have enacted a number of fairly costly programs designed to stimulate the economy and employment growth. Because many of these programs are fairly new, there has been little comprehensive examination of their impacts, but initial analysis suggests that these…

Caspar, Hartwig, and Moench do little to convince the authors of this paper that they have identified policy prescriptions that might usefully be applied to the United States. Caspar, Hartwig, and Moench suggest that in countries with high shares of temporary contract workers, employment reductions were sharper (because they could be). But does an…

We study how the employment effects of enterprise zones vary with their location, implementation, and administration, based on evidence from California. We use new establishment-level data and geographic mapping methods, coupled with a survey of enterprise zone administrators. Overall, the evidence indicates that enterprise zones do not increase…