This paper argues that President Nixon's wage and price controls, in affect from August 1971 to April 1974, laid the groundwork for the post-1973 decline in U.S. production worker real wages.

Between 1977 and 1995, real after-tax hourly compensation for production workers fell by almost 14 percent. Both real pre-tax wages and the real value of benefits fell over this period. These estimates were generated using a cost-of-living index that was adjusted for a wide range of upward and...

The loss of U.S. international hegemony was the major underlying cause of the decline of the U.S. postwar system of labor relations (i.e., the "capital-labor accord"). A fall in the cost of job loss and a weakening of the Keynesian State contributed only a little to the breakdown of the accord....

This paper constructs a model of the "institutional agenda" of capitalists in a closed domestic economy. The link between this agenda (i.e., the set of institutions capitalists desire) and the actual institutions regulating the economy is established. Some characteristics of this model are...