Ashenfelter and Krueger's (1993) within-twin, measurement-error- corrected estimate of the return to schooling is about 13-16 percent. If their estimate is unbiased, then their results imply considerable downward measurement error bias in uncorrected within-twin estimates of the return to...

Hostile takeovers may reduce the prevalence of long-term employment contracts if they facilitate the opportunistic expropriation of extramarginal wage payments. Our tests of two versions of the expropriation hypothesis improve on existing research by using firm- and establishment-level data from...

We use a unique new data set that combines individual worker data with data on workers' employers to estimate plant-level production functions and wage equations, and thus to compare relative marginal products and relative wages for various groups of workers. The data and empirical framework...

Nearly 100 cities and local governments in the United States passed living wage laws since the mid-1990s. The central goal of living wages is to reduce poverty, yet they may fail to do so because of disemployment effects. We summarize and critique the existing research on the effects of living...

This paper tests some empirical implications of the general human capital model's explanation of rising wage profiles. At the individual level, the model implies that there will be a negative relationship between the initial wage level and wage growth of young, inexperienced workers. At the...

In this paper, we first describe the 1990 DEED, the most recently constructed matched employer-employee data set for the United States that contains detailed demographic information on workers (most notably, information on education). We then use the data from manufacturing establishments in the...

We construct a prediction model for testing the hypothesis that firms with employees earning extramarginal wages--perhaps owing to long-term implicit contracts-were more likely to experience hostile tender offers from 1979-1989. Firms on the Compustat (active) file in 1979 comprise the domain...

Relying on data from the Health and Retirement Study, we examine differences between breast cancer survivors and a non-cancer control group in employment, hours worked, wages, and earnings. Overall, breast cancer has a negative impact on the decision to work. However, among survivors who work,...

We investigate the impact of union strength on changes in nonunion wages and employment. The prevailing model in this area is the threat model, which predicts that increases in union strength cause increases in nonunion wages and decreases in nonunion employment. In testing the threat model, we...