This article examines the relationship between performance-based pay and widening wage inequality using data from the Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC). The results suggest that jobs using performance-based pay have made only a modest contribution to increased inequality during the...

The authors estimate inter-industry wage differentials using the Bureau of Labor Statistics's National Compensation Survey (NCS) dataset. The NCS dataset has a number of distinct advantages over household survey datasets typically used for this purpose, in part because its establishment data...

We address basic questions about performance-related pay in the US. How widespread is it? What characteristics of employers and jobs are associated with it? What are recent trends in its incidence? What factors are responsible for these trends? Nearly two-fifths of hours worked in the US economy...

Are state and local government workers overcompensated? In this paper, we step back from the highly charged rhetoric and address this question with the two primary data sources for looking at compensation of state and local government workers: the Current Population Survey conducted by the...

A vast literature has sought to assess the magnitude of inter-industry differences in pay and explain why they exist. The measurement of inter-industry pay differentials and the resulting use of this information to assess the empirical relevance of different labor market theories have been...

It is well known that earnings inequality in the United States has been on the rise over the last three decades. Compensation inequality, while much less studied, has been moving upward as well. Motivated in part by an attempt to explain a widening of inequality in the upper part of the...

This paper assesses the relative contribution of the public and private sectors, through their employment and wages, to the black/white wage convergence that occurred in the U.S. economy over the 1963-92 period. Applying standard decomposition methods to Current Population Survey data, the...

This paper assesses the relative contribution of the public and private sectors, through their employment and wages, to the black/white wage convergence that occurred in the U.S. economy over the 1963–92 period. Applying standard decomposition methods to Current Population Survey data,...

This paper documents changing inequality in employer-provided fringe benefits in the United States using much more comprehensive data than previously available. Inequality growth in broader measures of compensation slightly exceeds wage inequality growth over the 1981-1997 period. Employer costs...