In theory, growing wage inequality within gender should cause women to invest more in their market productivity and should differentially pull able women into the workforce. Our paper uses Heckman's two-step estimator and identification at infinity on repeated Current Population Survey cross...

We examine the practice of military conscription around the world from the perspective of two standard theories as well as a new one, which emphasizes the fixed cost of introducing and administering the draft as a deterrent to its use. We find that, holding the relative size of the military...

Estimates of democracy's effect on the public sector are obtained from comparisons of 142 countries over the years 1960-90. Based on three tenets of voting theory--that voting mutes policy preference intensity, political power is equally distributed in democracies, and the form of voting...

We show how Barro and Sahasakul (1986) and Stephenson’s (1998) different methods for calculating time series of average marginal personal federal labor income tax rates are based on very different models of tax evasion and avoidance. One model assumes that taxable and untaxable income are...

A popular and long-standing view is that social security is a means for young, unemployed people to "purchase" jobs from older workers. Can social security, by encouraging retirement and hence creating job vacancies for the young, improve the allocation of workers to jobs? Maybe, according to a...

<DIV>The Affordable Care Act will have a dangerous effect on the American economy. That may sound like a political stance, but it’s actually a simple financial fact borne out by economic forecasts.  In <I>Side Effects and Complications</I>, preeminent labor economist Casey B. Mulligan brings to light the...</i></div>