Mirroring the railroad industry of the 1940's and 1950's, the trucking industry today appears to be achieving impressive productivity gains. But it is easy to confuse true productivity advances in transportation industries with changes in ton-miles per unit of input that are due simply to...

Using CPS data for the period 1979-2009, the wage dispersion of truck drivers (and subsets of the truck driving sample) is compared to the trends in wage dispersion of males economy-wide. We find that truckers' wages experienced a decrease in inequality post-deregulation, as expected given the...

Controversies over the promise and perils of union political influence have erupted around the U.S. This study develops the first evidence on the degree to which labor unions develop members' political leadership in the broader community by studying the relationship between state legislators'...

Using evidence from recent work on truckers and disaggregated older data prior researchers did not have, we revisit a classic topic and find some new answers. We focus on differentials in average annual earnings at the firm level among mileage-paid over-the-road tractor-trailer drivers (road...

This paper considers the role of gender in the promotion process and the impact of promotion on wages and wage growth, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). Its focus is upon mid-career promotion and wages, thereby complementing extant studies of the NLSY that...

Taking as our point of departure a model proposed by David Card (2001), we suggest new methods for analyzing wage dispersion in a partially unionized labor market. Card's method disaggregates the labor population into skill categories, which procedure entails some loss of information....

This paper offers a model to explain how computer technology has changed the labor market. It demonstrates that wage differentials between computer users and non-users are consistent with the fact that computers are first introduced in high-wage jobs because of cost efficiency. Furthermore,...

We study the impact of office and computing machinery (OCM) on the demands for workers with different educational levels. The empirical analysis relies on a system of demand equations that nests the translog, the generalised Leontief and the normalised quadratic specifications. Using panel data...

This paper examines the impact of innovations and wages on the demand for heterogeneous labour. Based on matched data from the IAB-establishment panel survey and the files of the employment statistics register for the year 1995, input shares derived from a generalised Leontief cost function are...

Any serious empirical study of factor substitutability has to allow the data to display complementarity as well as substitutability. The standard approach reflecting this idea is a translog specification – this is also the approach used by numerous studies analyzing the relative capital-skill...