Changes in the fraction of workers experiencing job separations can account for most of the increase in earnings dispersion that occurred both between, as well as within educational groups in the United States from the mid-1970s to the mid- 1980s. This is not true of changes in average earnings...

This paper examines the degree of income tax progressivity chosen through a simple majority vote in a model with savings. Households have permanent differences with respect to their labor productivity and their discount factors. The government has limited commitment to future policy, so voting...

Black males in the United States are exposed to tremendous violence at young ages: In the NLSY97 26 percent report seeing someone shot by age 12, and 43 percent by age 18. This paper studies how this exposure to violence and its associated social isolation affect education and labor market...

An Auerbach-Kotlikoff (AK) overlapping-generations model is used to examine how changes in marginal income-tax rate structures affect the distribution of income, drawing on actual changes to the U.S. tax code. This approach builds on AK by allowing for many different cohort types, and hence for...

A general equilibrium analysis of the effects of income redistribution and crime, showing that while expenditures on police protection reduce crime, it is possible for the crime rate to increase with redistribution.

This paper describes an overlapping-generations model of marriage, fertility, and income distribution.

A look at the implications for human resource management of the rising wage disparity found in a three-decades-long private salary survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

A general decomposition of earnings inequality is applied to the complete full-time labor force, including minorities and women. The results confirm that education premiums were the largest observable factor in the rise in earnings inequality in the 1980s, and also reveal an offsetting reduction...

An estimation of an optimal program of distortionary taxes, money growth, and borrowing to finance a stream of expenditures based on a real business cycle model in which distribution issues between the rich and poor play a fundamental role in policy decisions.

A study of rising wage inequality based on data from a private salary survey conducted over the last three decades.