Although intuitively appealing, the use of hedonic wage estimates to determine people's willingness to pay to avoid the risk of fatal hazards is fraught with problems. The theoretical basis for such estimates are flawed in a number of important ways. The underlying behavioral model is wrong,...

A rent-extraction model that takes into account workers' limited information about the profitability of the company they work for is developed. In that model high wage industries have high VPL so policies to shift employment to high wage industries are appropriate and past empirical studies of...

Akerlof and Dickens (1982) suggested that in a model of criminal behavior which considered the effects of cognitive dissonance, increasing the severity of punishment could increase the crime rate. This paper demonstrates that that conjecture was correct. With cognitive dissonance, people may...

For many reasons a group of workers may have sufficient bargaining power to claim for themselves some share of any monopoly surplus earned by an enterprise and (in the short run) a share of the return on fixed assets. This paper explores the effect of the threat of collective action on wages and...

When estimating linear models using grouped data researchers typically weight each observation by the group size. Under the assumption that the regression errors for the underlying micro data have expected values of zero, are independent and are homoscedastic, this procedure produces best linear...

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.

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals’ earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals' earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which...

The effect of the Great Recession on the U.S. labor market will likely persist even after economic output has recovered. Although the recession did not greatly change the relative probabilities of job loss for different types of workers, the long-run impact will vary by worker characteristics....