Between 1940 and 1950 wage differentials within and between labor market groups narrowed significantly - the so-called 'Great Compression'. This paper disaggregates the Great Compression into its public and private components. Wage compression in the public sector, along with a decline in the...

The wage structure in the U.S. public sector responded sluggishly to substantial changes in private sector wages during the 1970s and 1980s. Despite a large expansion in the college/high school wage differential during the 1980s in the private sector, the public sector college wage premium...

A stylized fact in the growing literature on public sector labor markets is that estimates of public sector union wage premia are significantly lower than estimates of private sector union wage premia. In this paper I investigate the hypothesis that this difference may in part be due to the...

This paper examines the structure, behavior and performance of the N95 respirator market in the U.S. before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-early 2022). It focuses on the behavior and performance of government and private sector organizations in the allocation of scarce supplies of N95...

Studies of public/private sector wage differentials typically assume that the govenment and union status of a worker are exogenous variables. Recently, some studies have relaxed this assumption slightly by allowing the union status to be endogenous. In this paper, we consider a more general...

Do the retirement patterns of public-sector workers differ from those in the private sector? Most private-sector workers today face a do-it-yourself retirement income landscape characterized by an exposure to market forces through defined-contribution pension plans and private saving, and the...

Arguments in favor of school choice depend on the idea that competition between schools improves the quality of education. However, we have almost no empirical evidence on whether competition actually affects school quality. In this study, I examine the effects of inter-school competition on...

This paper contrasts the differing experience of public sector unionism, which has expanded in the United States, and private sector unionism, which has contracted, in the past several decades. It uses the experience of other countries, particularly Canada, to rule out some explanations of the...

During the early 1980s, earnings inequality in the U.S. labor market rose relatively uniformly throughout the wage distribution. But this uniformity gave way to a significant divergence starting in 1987, with upper-tail (90/50) inequality rising steadily and lower tail (50/10) inequality either...

A recent "revisionist " literature characterizes the pronounced rise in U.S. wage inequality since 1980 as an "episodic " event of the first-half of the 1980s driven by non-market factors (particularly a falling real minimum wage) and concludes that continued increases in wage inequality since...