This article examines the relationship between performance-based pay and widening wage inequality using data from the Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC). The results suggest that jobs using performance-based pay have made only a modest contribution to increased inequality during the...

The authors estimate inter-industry wage differentials using the Bureau of Labor Statistics's National Compensation Survey (NCS) dataset. The NCS dataset has a number of distinct advantages over household survey datasets typically used for this purpose, in part because its establishment data...

We address basic questions about performance-related pay in the US. How widespread is it? What characteristics of employers and jobs are associated with it? What are recent trends in its incidence? What factors are responsible for these trends? Nearly two-fifths of hours worked in the US economy...

Are state and local government workers overcompensated? In this paper, we step back from the highly charged rhetoric and address this question with the two primary data sources for looking at compensation of state and local government workers: the Current Population Survey conducted by the...

This paper assesses the relative contribution of the public and private sectors, through their employment and wages, to the black/white wage convergence that occurred in the U.S. economy over the 1963–92 period. Applying standard decomposition methods to Current Population Survey data,...

This paper documents changing inequality in employer-provided fringe benefits in the United States using much more comprehensive data than previously available. Inequality growth in broader measures of compensation slightly exceeds wage inequality growth over the 1981-1997 period. Employer costs...

Self-employed workers are less likely to be affected by implicit contracts, efficiency wages, and other forces that mute wage cyclicality and exacerbate employment cyclicality. This observation motivates the authors' comparison of the cyclical experience of the self-employed with 'wage and...