The decomposition of wage residuals into standard deviation and percentile ranks can be misleading because the two measures are not necessarily independent. With rising wage inequality, the mean percentile rank of low-wage groups will rise simply because more dispersed distributions have thicker...

Adam Smith's discussion of the payment of teachers is reviewed in terms of industrial organization and agency theory. The impli cit stu-dent fees necessary to support annual salaries average $1.30 per class meeting in primary and secondary schools and rise to $4.00 per lecture and up for college...

Much of the male-female wage differential exists because men and women are assigned to different jobs. Within narrow job categories, there is no male-female differential. Only a tortured taste theory of discrimination can reconcile these facts. The authors argue that differential movement along...

Rapidly growing costs of elementary and secondary education are studied in the context of the rising value of women's time. The dramatic increase in direct costs of education per student in the past three decades is empirically linked to increasing demand and utilization of teacher and staff...