Surveys have shown that many employers offer severance packages to their laid-off workers and that severance pay provides substantial income for many people displaced from long-time jobs. Yet little, if anything , is known about the effects of severance pay. Does it lead people to alter the...

The distribution of manufacturing employment across regions of the United States has changed tremendously over time. Shares of manufacturing employment in older, northern regions of the country have declined markedly relative to shares in the Sunbelt regions. But the shifting of manufacturing...

New England has undergone significant change in its employment and labor force over the past three decades. Employment in the region has shifted from manufacturing into services at a faster rate than it has in the United States as a whole. Within manufacturing the trend has been away from...

This article attempts to identify precursors, or indicators, of New England employment. The predictive power of a diverse array of variables is calculated and compared. However, because no single variable is likely to contain all information of predictive value, the article then explores...

The current U.S. economic expansion is unusually long and strong. Has it served as a "rising tide" to float all boats in the labor market benefiting everyone? To what degree are groups that are typically disadvantaged in the labor market-blacks, women, teens, the less educated-participating in...

The combination of very low unemployment rates and somewhat limited wage and salary pressures has called into question our ability to measure labor market tightness. One issue is the extent to which labor availability is understated, given the existence of people who are not actively looking for...

The trend toward increased wage and income inequality that emerged in the 1980s—with "the rich getting richer and the poor poorer"—has attracted a great deal of attention and concern. One aspect of this phenomenon has been the growing premium for education, with the disparity between the...