Rigidity in wages has long been thought to impede the functioning of labor markets. One recent strand of the research on wage flexibility in the United States and elsewhere has focused on the possibility of downward nominal wage rigidity and what implications such rigidity might have for the...

When obtaining information on individuals' race and ethnicity, the Current Population Survey (CPS) currently follows the 1997 OMB standards, which prescribes race and Hispanic ethnicity as distinct concepts that should be asked about in separate questions. In 2024, OMB updated the standards to...

The Employment Cost Index measures the change in wage rates for a fixed set of jobs over time. The separate indices for industry and occupation groups grew at varying rates during the 1980s. However, their growth rates have been much more similar since then, which implies that the increase in...

We investigate the impact of tax subsidies on the firms decision to offer insurance, and on conditional firm spending on insurance. We do so using the micro-data underlying the Employee Compensation Index, which has a major advantage for this exercise: the matching of very high quality...