The authors use trends in self-reported disability to gauge the impact of the growth of disability transfer programs on the labor force attachment of older working-aged men. The authors' tabulations suggest that between 1949 and 1987, about half of the 4.9 percentage point drop in the labor...

This paper shows a widening in black-white earnings and employment gaps among young men from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. Earnings gaps increased most among college graduates and in the Midwest, while gaps in employment-population rates grew most among dropouts. The authors attribute the...

Demand for less-skilled workers plummeted in developed countries in the 1980s. In open economies, pervasive skill-biased technological change (SBTC) can explain this decline. SBTC tends to increase the domestic supply of unskill-intensive goods by releasing less-skilled labor. The more countries...

This paper investigates the shift in demand away from unskilled and toward skilled labor in U.S. manufacturing over the 1980s. Production labor-saving technological change is the chief explanation for this shift. That conclusion is based on three facts: (1) the shift is due mostly to increased...

Estimates of the effect of college selectivity on earnings may be biased because elite colleges admit students, in part, based on characteristics that are related to future earnings. We matched students who applied to, and were accepted by, similar colleges to try to eliminate this bias. Using...

This paper analyzes data on 11,600 students and their teachers who were randomly assigned to different size classes from kindergarten through third grade. Statistical methods are used to adjust for nonrandom attrition and transitions between classes. The main conclusions are (1) on average,...

This paper examines the effect of skill-biased technological change as measured by computerization on the recent widening of U.S. educational wage differentials. An analysis of aggregate changes in the relative supplies and wages of workers by education from 1940 to 1996 indicates strong and...