An examination of the divergence of U.S. regional fortunes in the early 1980s, showing that once regional prices are factored in, relative wage rates continue to converge across regions. The trend in regional wage variation is also shown to be attributable to declining differences in labor...

Earnings data are often reported in round numbers. In fact, in the March 1995 Current Population Survey (CPS), 71% of all full-time earnings responses are some multiple of $1,000. Rounding is typically ignored in analyses of earnings data, which effectively treats it as noise in the data. Our...

The large shift of U.S. employment from goods producers to service producers has generated concern over future income distribution, because of perceived large relative pay differences. This paper applies a nonparametric density overlap statistic to compare the sectors distribution of full-time,...

Inflation has been accused of causing distortionary prices and wage fluctuations (sand) as well as lauded for facilitating adjustments to shocks when wages are rigid downwards (grease). This paper investigates whether these two effects can be distinguished from each other in a labor market by...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals’ earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals' earnings in thirty-one different data sets from sixteen countries, from...

Is there any evidence to support the assumption that increased wages cause inflation? This study updates and expands earlier research into this question and finds little support for the view that higher wages cause higher prices. On the contrary, more evidence is found for higher prices leading...