This paper reviews a set of recent studies that have attempted to measure the causal effect of education on labor market earnings by using institutional features of the supply side of the education system as exogenous determinants of schooling outcomes. A simple theoretical model that highlights...

I discuss the recent literature that has led to new interest in the idea of monopsonistic wage setting. Building on advances in search theory and in models of differentiated products, researchers have used a number of different strategies to identify the elasticity of firm-specific labor supply....

This paper describes the effects of deregulation on negotiated wage rates and employment levels of aircraft mechanics in the scheduled airline industry. Firm-specific data for the incumbent trunk airlines show relatively small changes in real wage rates since deregulation,and only recent...

Cost of living escalators are an important feature of North American labor contracts. This paper presents a measure of the response of index-linked wage increases to concurrent price increases for a sample of Canadian contracts, and then analyses this response in terms of a simple model of...

Immigration is often viewed as a proximate cause of the rising wage gap between high- and low-skilled workers. Nevertheless, there is controversy over the appropriate framework for measuring the presumed effect, and over the magnitudes involved. This paper offers an overview and synthesis of...

This paper reviews the recent evidence on U.S. immigration, focusing on two key questions: (1) Does immigration reduce the labor market opportunities of less-skilled natives? (2) Have immigrants who arrived after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act successfully assimilated? Looking across major...

This paper presents new evidence on the effects of changing union membership on trends in wage dispersion in the U.S. labor market. I use data from the mid-1970s and early 1990s to compare union membership rates for workers in different deciles of the wage distribution, and to calculate the...

This paper uses 1990 Census data to study the effects of immigrant inflows on the labor market opportunities of natives and older immigrants. I divide new immigrants, older immigrants, and natives into distinct skill groups and focus on skill-group-specific outcomes within cities. An important...

This paper uses a variety of data sources to study the effect of deregulation on the structure of wages in the airline industry. Microdata from the 1980 and 1990 Censuses show a 10 percent decline in the relative earnings of airline workers after deregulation, with roughly similar declines for...