In late 1981 Federal workplace safety officers, and those of several states, began on-site checks of plants' injury records to determine which establishments to inspect. Critics claim incentives for underreporting were thus created, and that published injury rates could be biased downward....

This paper explores the determinants of pension funding in the public sector. We formulate and test several hypotheses about the determinants of public employer pension funding practices, using a new data set describing financial and other characteristics of state, local, and teacher plans. The...

This paper simulates the likely effects of a comparable-worth, wage-adjustment policy in the state and local sector on female employment in the sector. The simulation is based on estimates of within- occupation male/female substitution and across-occupation employment substitution obtained using...

This paper contains a review of the early history of program evaluation research at the US Department of Labor. Some broad lessons for successful evaluation research are summarized.

A real wage rate is a nominal wage rate divided by the price of a good and is a transparent measure of how much of the good an hour of work buys. It provides an important indicator of the living standards of workers, and also of the productivity of workers. In this paper I set out the conceptual...

In this article we provide an overview of the extensive literature on the impact of weather and climate on grapes and wine with the goal of describing how climate change is likely to affect their production. We start by discussing the physical impact of weather on vine phenology, berry...

Expert agents, such as lawyers, play a prominent role in conflict resolution, yet little is known about how they affect outcomes. We construct a model that permits us to estimate the influence of agents and test whether the parties in a dispute face prisoner's dilemma incentives. Using eighteen...

In this essay, I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, <em>Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius</em>. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how...