To what extent do different firms follow different wage policies? How do such policies affect worker mobility between firms, and what are the effects of different wage bargaining regimes? The empirical branch of personnel economics has long been hampered by a lack of representative data sets....

One of the strongest trends in recent macroeconomic modeling of labor market fluctuations is to treat unemployment inflows as acyclical. This trend stems in large part from an influential paper by Shimer on "Reassessing the Ins and Outs of Unemployment," i.e., the extent to which increased...

I synthesize and summarize a set of recent papers on changes in the employment relationship. The authors of these papers present the most up-to-date and accurate assessment of their evidence on changes in job stability and job security, and attempt to reconcile their evidence with the findings...

Concern about job instability and insecurity has a long history and has generated a considerable body of research across the social sciences, most recently focused on whether job stability and security have declined. Internally flexible systems for organizing work, sometimes called 'functionally...

Job reallocation is considered to be a key characteristic of well-functioning labor markets, as more productive firms grow and less productive ones contract or close. However, despite its potential benefits for the economy, there are significant costs that are borne by displaced workers. We...

Previous studies of recent U.S. trends in intergenerational income mobility have produced widely varying results, partly because of large sampling errors. By making more efficient use of the available information in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we generate more reliable estimates of the...

Shifts in the incidence of various types of training over the 1980s favored more-educated, more-experienced workers. Coupled with the fact that this training is associated with higher wages, these shifts suggest that training may have contributed to the growth of wage inequality in this period....

The need for school-to-work programs or other means of increasing early job market stability is predicated on the view that the chaotic' nature of youth labor markets in the U.S. is costly because workers drift from one job to another without developing skills, behavior, or other characteristics...

There has been a remarkable increase in wage inequality in the US, UK and many other countries over the past three decades. A significant part of this appears to be within observable groups (such as age-gender-skill cells). A generally untested implication of many theories rationalizing the...

The recent debate over minimum wages raises two questions. First, should policy makers no longer believe that minimum wages entail negative consequences for teenagers? Second, should economists discard the competitive labor market model? Our evidence for teenagers, using matched CPS surveys,...