Generous unemployment benefits lie at the heart of the conventional explanation for persistent high unemployment. The effects of benefit generosity on work incentives are more ambiguous in a broader behavioural framework in which workers get substantial disutility from unemployment (given...

Generous unemployment benefits lie at the heart of the conventional explanation for persistent high unemployment. The effects of benefit generosity are more ambiguous in a broader behavioral framework in which workers get substantial disutility from unemployment controlling for income, and know...

Nearly one-third of all American workers are paid very low wages, the highest rate among wealthy nations. An incidence of low pay at this level has obvious implications for the current standard of living for a substantial share of American families. But of particular concern are the implications...

It is widely accepted that global forces of technology and trade have caused a profound shift in labor demand towards the most highly skilled, generating sharply rising earnings inequality in flexible labor markets (the U.S.) and persistently high unemployment in rigid labor markets (Europe)....

Measured by changes in real wages, earnings inequality and unemployment, the economic position of lower skilled workers has declined sharply over the past two decades across the developed countries of the OECD. In this paper we survey a wide-ranging empirical literature for evidence bearing on...

The improvement in the relative economic status of African-American Workers in the 1960's and 1970's was reversed in the 1980's, a decade that also featured a collapse in the relative (and real) wages of the last skilled (Bound and Freeman, 1992; Blau and Kahn, 1992; Levy and Murnane, 1992). At the same...

The sharp decline in real wages and the drop in relative earnings among low–skilled workers generally is attributed to structural shifts in the labor force induced by technological change that has limited the demand for workers with low skill levels. While the claim that the cause of reduced...