In this paper, the authors survey noncompetitive theories of training. With competitive labor markets, firms never pay for investments in general training, whereas when labor markets are imperfect, firm-sponsored training arises as an equilibrium phenomenon. The authors discuss a variety of...

This article investigates how changing the length of the school year, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged, affects learning and subsequent earnings. I use variation introduced by the West German short school years in 1966-7, which exposed some students to a total of about two thirds of a year...

The UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) has had a minimal impact on UK wage inequality because it has been set at a modest level and because aggregate evidence suggests very small spill-over effects. But the small spill-over effects might be because of the small numbers of workers affected and...

This paper looks at the consequences of introducing employment adjustment costs into two standard models of trade unions--the right-to-manage model and the efficient-bargain model. The authors look at how unions affect both the speed of adjustment to equilibrium and the long-run equilibrium....

This paper aims to embed two popular models of trade union behavior, the monopoly model and the efficient bargaining model, in a more general framework. It does this by analyzing sequential bargaining models where wages are determined before employment and the power of the union in the two...

Most economists believe that wage-setting is very important for understanding macroeconomic behavior, but the form of wage equations commonly estimated suffer from problems of identification. The aim of this paper is to consider whether these problems are inevitable and, if they are not, to...

Women in Britain who work part-time have, on average, hourly earnings about 25% less than that of women working full-time. This gap has widened greatly over the past 30 years. This article tries to explain this part-time pay penalty. It shows that a sizeable part of the penalty can be...