We document sectoral differences in changes in output, hours worked, prices, and nominal wages in the United States during the Great Depression. We explore whether contractionary monetary shocks combined with different degrees of nominal wage frictions across sectors are consistent with both...

Changes in the fraction of workers experiencing job separations can account for most of the increase in earnings dispersion that occurred both between, as well as within educational groups in the United States from the mid-1970s to the mid- 1980s. This is not true of changes in average earnings...

The current wage at a job may not fully reflect the "value" of that job. For example, a job with a low starting wage may be preferred to one with a high starting wage if the growth rate of wages is higher in the former than in the latter. In fact, differences in wage growth can potentially...

A demonstration that unionization can affect cost of production through increases in compensation, through shifts in technologies, and through deviations from the least-cost combination of inputs (the factor-use effect).

A report showing that although rounding in earnings data is typically ignored, its systematic nature affects some commonly used statistics based on earnings data, particularly those focusing on a specific region of the wage distribution.

A study of rising wage inequality based on data from a private salary survey conducted over the last three decades.

An analysis of a one-period, two-sector model in which firms must pay a fixed cost of hiring. The authors show that this type of model results in more employment variability and less-procyclical wages than do models without fixed hiring costs.

In hiring new workers, risk-neutral employers equate the present expected value of each worker's compensation to the present expected value of higher productivity, Data detailing how present expected compensation varies with the age of hire embed, therefore, information about how productivity...

This paper studies sunspot fluctuations in a model with heterogeneous households. We find that wealth inequality reduces the degree of increasing returns needed to produce indeterminacy, while wage inequality increases it. When the model is calibrated to match the joint distribution of hours,...