This paper provides evidence on the behavior of reservation wages over the spell of unemployment using high‐frequency longitudinal data. Using data from our survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey, where workers were interviewed each week for up to 24 weeks, we find that self‐reported...

This paper provides evidence on the behavior of reservation wages over the spell of unemployment using high‐frequency longitudinal data. Using data from our survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey, where workers were interviewed each week for up to 24 weeks, we find that self‐reported...

This paper tries to reconcile evidence on the effect of schooling on income and on GDP growth from the microeconometric and empirical macro growth literatures. Much microeconometric evidence suggests that education is an important causal determinant of income for individuals within countries as...

The average wage differential between black and white men fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1980. Much of this convergence is attributable to a relative increase in the rate of return to schooling among black workers. It is widely argued that the growth in the relative return to...

This paper considers conceptual and practical issues that arise in measuring labor's share of national income. Most importantly: How are workers defined? How is compensation defined? The current definition of labor compensation used the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) includes the salary of...

This chapter examines the labor supply effects of social insurance programs. We argue that this topic deserves separate treatment from the rest of the labor supply literature because individuals may be imperfectly informed as to the rules of the programs and because key parameters are likely to...

This paper compares self-reported changes in families' financial status to actual changes based on annual time-series data calculated from the PSID. The results indicate that the Consumer Price Index does a reasonably accurate job reconciling self-reported changes in financial status with...

Between 1970 and 1973 priority for military service was randomly assigned to draft-age men in a series of lotteries. Many men who were at risk of being drafted managed to avoid military service by enrolling in school and obtaining an educational deferment This paper uses the draft lottery as a...

The method of instrumental variables was first used in the 1920s to estimate supply and demand elasticities, and later used to correct for measurement error in single-equation models. Recently, instrumental variables have been widely used to reduce bias from omitted variables in estimates of...

The most widely used measure of employer health care costs, the health insurance component of the Employment Cost Index, indicates that cost growth has decelerated since 1989. In recent years employer expenditures per hour worked have even declined in nominal dollars. This paper analyzes the...