Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has experienced a growing wage differential: high-skilled workers have claimed an increasing share of available income, while low-skilled workers have seen an absolute decline in real wages. How and why this disparity has arisen is a matter of ongoing...

The paper develops a simple stochastic new open economy macroeconomic model based on sticky nominal wages. Explicit solution of the wage-setting problem under uncertainty allows one to analyze the effects of the monetary regime on welfare, expected output, and the expected terms of trade....

This paper analyzes two simple wage rules that keep employment constant when there are shocks to the prices of imported materials. One rule ties nominal wages to the GNP deflator rather than the consumer price index. The second rule, followed by Japan after the second oil price shock, ties the...

Poor countries must specialize in standardized. labor-intensive commodities. Middle income countries may have a richer menu of options available to them if their labor force is reasonably well-educated and skilled. This paper is motivated by the possibility that there may exist multiple...

This paper investigates the effect of entrepreneurs' personal income tax situations on their use of labor. We analyze the income tax returns of a large number of sole proprietors before and after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and determine how the substantial reductions in marginal tax rates...

We study how referral hiring contributes to racial inequality in firm-level labor demand over the firm's life cycle using data from Brazil. We consider a search model where referral networks are segregated, firms are more informed about the match quality of referred candidates, and some...

Consider a labor market in which firms want to insure existing employees against income fluctuations and, simultaneously, want to recruit new employees to fill vacant jobs. Firms can commit to a wage policy, i.e. a policy that specifies the wage paid to their employees as a function of tenure,...

We provide a test for statistical discrimination or rational stereotyping in in environments in which agents learn over time. Our application is to the labor market. If profit maximizing firms have limited information about the general productivity of new workers, they may choose to use easily...