This policy brief explores the nature of the recent change in the vacancy-unemployment relationship by disaggregating the data by industry, age, education, and duration of unemployment, and by examining blue- and white-collar groups separately.

This study analyzes the components of the post-1950 trends in the share of the private work force organized by unions, which rose from 1950 to 1954 and then fell steadily to 1980. The authors decompose the sources of growth and decline into changes in organizing activity, success in...

The simplest economic theories of crime predict that profit-maximizing firms should follow strategies of minimal monitoring with large penalties for employee crime. We investigate possible reasons why firms actually spend considerable resources trying to detect employee malfeasance. We find that...

In efficiency wage models firms set employment so that the value of the marginal revenue product of labor (VMRPL) equals the wage. If the payment of efficiency wages results in inter-industry wage differences for comparable workers there exist welfare enhancing industrial and trade policies...