We study the wage-change distributions in union contractsreached in Canada between 1976-1999. We use non-parametric tests to check for nominal wage rigidity and find that it is present during low inflation periods.

We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, in contrast to previous univariate approaches, we consider income and life expectancy...