Real estate agents typically receive commissions based on a fixed percentage of home price purchases. Because housing prices vary across markets, one might expect that realtors have higher earnings in high-priced markets. Prior work by Hsieh and Moretti (2003) suggests that entry among realtors...

Using a common methodology, the effects of unions on wage levels and wage dispersion are estimated for two neighboring countries, Bolivia and Chile, and for the U.S. The analysis shows that unions have broadly similar effects on the wage distribution within these three economies. The findings...

Progress in narrowing black-white earnings differences has been far from continuous, with some of the apparent progress resulting from labor force withdrawal among lower-skilled African Americans. This paper builds on prior research and documents racial and ethnic differences in male earnings...

During the 1930s and 1940s, collective bargaining emerged as the workplace governance norm in much of the U.S. industrial sector. Following its peak in the 1950s, union density in the U.S. private sector fell steadily, to only 7.4 percent in 2006. Governance shifted from a formalized union norm...

The law of one wage does not strictly hold, nor should it be expected to hold, in contemporary labor markets. The law of one wage, however, provides a surprisingly good first approximation of the structure of U.S. wages. This generalization is drawn from research on a diverse set of topics: the...