On April 1, 1992 New Jersey's minimum wage increased from $4.25 to $5.05 per hour. To evaluate the impact of the law we surveyed 410 fast food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before and after the rise in the minimum. Comparisons of the changes in wages, employment, and prices at...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of changes in individual earnings and hours over time. Using longitudinal data from three panel surveys,we catalogue the main features of the covariance structure of changes in earnings and hours. We then present an interpretation of these features in...

One of the central issues in evaluating the ongoing shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pension plans is the degree to which assets in DC plans will be withdrawn before plan participants reach retirement age. The annual flow of withdrawals from such plans, which are...

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...

When wage contracts are relatively short-lived, rent sharing may reduce the incentives for investment since some of the returns to sunk capital are captured by workers. In this paper we use a matched worker-firm data set from the Veneto region of Italy that combines Social Security earnings...