This paper examines whether a tradeoff exists between the level of pension benefits and wages for comparably skilled workers. The 1983 survey of Consumer Finances is used to match detailed information on pension plans to detailed personal characteristics of a random sample of the population. The...

In this paper I examine regional labor market behavior in the United States and Japan. In contrast with the picture at the aggregate level, Japanese labor markets at the prefectural (regional) level appear to exhibit substantially more persistence than state level labor markets in the United...

Despite the presence of anecdotal evidence linking regional economic growth and the presence of quality universities in such areas as the Silicon Valley in California and Route 128 in Boston, there have been few systematic studies of the relationship between universities and local economies. In...

In this paper we use micro data from the Employment Opportunity Pilot Project (EOPP) surveys of firms in 1980 and 1982 to test for labor market rigidities and asymmetries in response to demand shifts. We analyze wage and employment adjustments to positive and negative shifts, as measured by...

A key tenet of the theory of human capital is that investment in skills results in higher productivity. The previous literature has estimated the degree of investment in human capital for individuals by looking at individual wage growth as a proxy for productivity growth. In this paper, we have...

This paper compares the impact of new IT-enhanced technology on the efficiency of production in the U.S. and the U.K. for one manufacturing industry, valve manufacturing. There is a long-standing question of whether technological change and organizational changes have the same rates of adoption...

This paper investigates the individual and joint effects of group incentive pay and problem-solving teams on productivity. To estimate models of adoption of these work practices and models of the effects of the work practices on productivity, we constructed a data set on the operations of 34...

Increasingly, firms are considering the adoption of new work practices, such as problem-solving teams, enhanced communication with workers, employment security, flexibility in job assignments, training workers for multiple jobs, and greater reliance on incentive pay. This paper provides...

In this paper we use that the theory of compensating differentials to identify sources of heterogeneity in firms' costs of providing fringe benefits and hence heterogeneity in the magnitude of the compensating differential. We estimate the relationship between pensions and wages controlling for...

With malls, franchise strips and big-box retailers increasingly dotting the landscape, there is concern that middle-class jobs in manufacturing in the U.S. are being replaced by minimum wage jobs in retail. Retail jobs have spread, while manufacturing jobs have shrunk in number. In this paper,...