Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the author examines the cyclicality of wages within employer-employee matches for the years 1970-91. Recent research on wage cyclicality has suggested that wages are very procyclical (tending to rise and fall with economic upturns and...

In this article, I evaluate the hypothesis that firms respond to negative demand shocks by assigning workers to tasks that require less skill than the tasks they normally carry out. Using changes in employment in state-industry cells as a measure of demand conditions facing individual firms, I...

The author uses longitudinal data to study the effects of industry growth and decline on wage changes between 1976 and 2001. He finds that over this period, workers who were initially in industries that subsequently expanded enjoyed faster wage growth than other workers. Moreover, wage growth...

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that true wage changes have many fewer nominal cuts and more nominal freezes than reported nominal wage changes. The data overwhelmingly rejects a model of flexible wage changes and provides some evidence against a model of perfect downward...

In the 1980s, both wages and labor supply of poorly educated men fell substantially relative to those of educated men. Some observers have interpreted this positive association between changes in wages and labor supply as reflecting movement along stable labor supply curves. The author casts...

Governments invest a lot of money in education, so it is important to understand the benefits of this spending. One essential aspect is that education may make people better parents and thus improve the educational and employment outcomes of their children. Interventions that encourage the...

Political systems may respond not only to elections but also to expressions of dissatisfaction through complaints and geographic mobility. Understanding the implications of citizen dissatisfaction with local public services is the goal of this article, which examines empirically two forms of...

Much evidence suggests that having more education leads to higher earnings in the labor market. However, there is little evidence about whether having more education causes employees to experience lower earnings volatility or shelters them from the adverse effects of recessions. We use a large...

We find substantial differences in college applications for students who have equal college opportunities and prior achievement but vary in distance to the nearest selective and non- selective college. Students who live closer to a selective college are more likely to list prestigious programs...