We study how the hourly wage structure varies with establishment size and how wage dispersion breaks down into between-plant and within-plant components Our study combines household and establishment data for the U.S. manufacturing sector in 1982. 1) Wage dispersion falls sharply with...

This paper exploits a rich and largely untapped source of information on the wages and other characteristics of individual manufacturing plants to cast new light on recent changes in the United States wage structure. Our primary data source, the Longitudinal Research Datafile (LRD) , contains...

This paper studies quarterly employment flows of approximately 10,000 large U.S. manufacturing establishments during 1972:1-1980:4.After estimating the extent of short run microeconomic substitution between employment and hours per worker (hours-week), we construct measures of the path of the...

This paper provides empirical evidence on macroeconomic complementarities, a restriction on the nature of interaction between individuals in a multi-agent setting. These models imply that activities across agents will be positively correlated, that discrete decisions will be synchronized and...

This paper studies the dynamic properties of an imperfectly competitive economy with inventory holdings. In particular, we focus on the serial correlation in aggregate output and employment produced by the holding of inventories in one sector of the economy and the co-movement between sectors of...

In recent years a growing number of countries have constructed data series on job creation and job destruction using establishment- level data sets. This paper provides a description and detailed comparison of these new data series for the United States and Canada. First, the Canadian and United...

The conventional wisdom is that the rising productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector in the 1980s has been driven by the apparently pervasive downsizing over this period. Aggregate evidence clearly shows falling employment accompanying the rise in productivity. In this paper, we examine the...

This paper investigates how job creation and destruction behavior varies by employer size in the U.S. manufacturing sector during the period 1972 to 1988. The paper also evaluates the empirical basis for conventional claims about the job-creating prowess of small businesses. The chief findings...

We analyze employment and capital adjustments using plant data from the Colombian Annual Manufacturing Survey. We estimate adjustment functions for capital and labor as a non-linear function of the gaps between desired and actual factor levels, allowing for interdependence in adjustments of the...

In this paper, we exploit plant-level data for U.S. manufacturing for the 1970s and 1980s to explore the connections between changes in technology and the structure of employment and wages. We focus on the nonproduction labor share (measured alternatively by employment and wages) as the variable...