Rebecca M. Blank considers how the flexibility of American labor markets and the regulation and redistribution policies of European labor markets may determine employers' responses to worldwide economic transformations that result in increasing wage disparity in the United States and continuing...

This paper reviews the U.S. welfare reform efforts over the 1990s and the effects of these reforms to date. Seven lessons of potential interest to European observers are discussed, with particular attention to the conclusions of more recent research. Such research indicates, for example, that...

The privatization of social services is being increasingly discussed. The social services market is characterized by multiple market failures, including informational asymmetries, agency problems, externalities, and distributional concerns. Consumers may care as much or more about quality of...

This paper investigates cyclicality in real wages between 1969 and 1982, using 14 years of data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics. First, it investigates the extent to which movements in and out of the labor market created apparent wage cyclicality. Second, it investigates whether...