In models recently published by several influential macroeconomic theorists, rigidity in the real wages that firms pay newly hired workers plays a crucial role in generating realistically large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment. There is remarkably little evidence, however, on whether...

For more than 80 years, many macroeconomic analyses have been premised on the assumption that workers' nominal wage rates cannot be cut. Contrary evidence from household surveys reasonably has been discounted on the ground that the measurement of frequent wage cuts might be an artifact of...

In the period since the 1960's, as in other periods, aggregate time series on real wages have displayed only modest cyclicality. Macroeconomists therefore have described weak cyclicality of real wages as a salient feature of the business cycle. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, our analysis...

Before 1979, unemployment insurance (UI) benefits were not treated as taxable income in the United States. Several economists criticized this policy on the ground that not taxing UI benefits while taxing earned income allegedly encourages unemployed persons to conduct longer than socially...

This study uses intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate the effects of family and community background on men's economic status. It is distinguished from most previous studies by its emphasis on community influences and on influences from poverty and welfare...

This paper is an examination of cyclical real wage behavior in the United States since World War II. Like most previous aggregate studies. ours finds little cyclicalitv in aggregate industry real wage data. On the other hand, our analysis of longitudinal microdata from the Panel Study of Income...

Many previous studies have used sibling correlations to measure the effect of family background on earnings, income? and occupational status. This paper uses data on a sample of sisters to explore the importance of family background as a determinant of welfare program participation. The results...

Several recent studies use the schooling and wage variation between monozygotic twins to estimate the return to schooling. In this paper, we summarize the results from this literature, and we examine the implications of endogenous determination of which twin goes to school longer and of...

This paper presents a wage bargaining model in which the employer and employee are each uncertain about the other's reservation wage. Under specified circumstances, the model's equilibrium is shown to involve unilateral wage setting and inefficient labor turnover. In addition, aggregate demand...

The purpose of this paper is to help empirical economists think through when and how to weight the data used in estimation. We start by distinguishing two purposes of estimation: to estimate population descriptive statistics and to estimate causal effects. In the former type of research,...