In standard economic theory, labor supply decisions depend on the complete set of prices: wages and the prices of relevant consumption goods. Nonetheless, most theoretical and empirical work in labor supply studies ignore prices other than wages. We address the question of whether the common...

How significant was the economic progress of African Americans in the United States between 1970 and 2000? In this paper the authors examine this issue for black men 25 to 55 years of age who live in 14 large U.S. metropolitan areas. They present the evidence that significant racial disparities...

Workers present employers with a range of tricky problems. They can be crooked, subversive, surly, or indolent, even if they are paid on time. Joseph A. Ritter and Lowell J. Taylor explore economists' main theories of how compensation is used to address employee motivation and how these models...