With malls, franchise strips, and big-box retailers increasingly dotting the landscape, many are concerned that U.S. middle-class jobs in manufacturing are being replaced by minimum-wage jobs in retail. Retail jobs have spread, whereas manufacturing jobs have shrunk in number. The authors show...

The empirical analysis in this paper, which draws on Current Population Survey data, indicates that structural decline in the steel industry during the 1980s markedly affected the distribution of wages both in the industry and in steel-producing communities. The steelworker wage distribution...

Using standard measures of income inequality and detailed pension benefit information on participants in the 1983 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), the authors investigate how pension benefits affected the distribution of earned income. The results suggest that private pensions increased annual...