Nominal wage stickiness is an important component of recent medium-scale structural macroeconomic models, but to date there has been little microeconomic evidence supporting the as- sumption of sluggish nominal wage adjustment. We present evidence on the frequency of nominal wage adjustment...

By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership. We study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the...

This paper provides a theoretical framework to analyze workers' incentives under different ownership. It shows that the workers' effort and expected income are higher and the monitoring intensity is lower in the employee-owned firm than in the capitalist firm. Unlike in previous models, the...

This paper studies the soft budget constraint problem in a principal-agent model. The agent screens projects of and makes initial investment in the projects that have passed the screening. He then finds the types of the funded projects and decides to close some of the ex post inefficient ones...

Some public policies aimed at integrating welfare recipients into the world of work are predicated on the premise that getting welfare recipients to work will change their beliefs about how they will be treated in the labor market. This paper explores the rationale for these policies and...

This paper presents a framework for the evaluation and measurement of reversal and origin independence as separate aspects of economic mobility. We show how that evaluation depends on aversion to multi-period inequality, aversion to inter-temporal fluctuations, and aversion to second-period...

We use the Michigan Panel Data Study on Income Dynamics to decompose the well-known rise in cross-sectional variance of individual male earnings in the U.S. into permanent and transitory components. We find that about half of the increase has arisen from an increase in the variance of permanent...

This paper asks whether wage subsidies encourages participants to move into jobs with greater wage growth. We provide an analytical framework that identifies the key causal links between earnings subsidies and both within-and between-job wage growth. This framework highlights the importance of...

Measures of inequality and mobility based on self-reported earnings reflect attributes of both the joint distribution of earnings across time and the joint distribution of measurement error and earnings. While classical measurement error would increase measures of inequality and mobility there...