Many studies have examined the influence of union density (union members as a percentage of all workers) on earnings in the private sector, but few such studies have looked at the public sector. Using data from the 1991 Current Population Survey, this study estimates the determinants of earnings...

Past research demonstrates that the estimated size of the federal government earnings differential shrinks substantially with the addition of detailed occupational controls. Possible explanations for this reduction are: controlling for the differing sectoral distributions of common occupations,...

A decline in pension coverage during the 1980s for males in the private sector is confirmed and is contrasted with the federal, state, and local sectors in which no such decline is found. As a consequence, the governmental advantage in the probability of coverage grew over the 1980s. This...

Economists use average wage differentials to examine whether public- and private-sector workers have comparable earnings. Such average differentials, originally developed for other purposes, fail to measure the true distance from comparability. In short, if average earnings in the public and...

Two well-documented empirical findings are that unionized employees typically receive substantially higher compensation than their non-union counterparts and that union representation in the United States has declined over time. Some observers have hypothesized a causal link between these two...

In the presence of job matching, the returns to education signals are shown to decline in value as additional work experience allows more direct observation of productivity. This is tested by estimating sheepskin effects across five age cohorts of nonminority males in 1991. The effects are large...