An early retirement window is an offer, by an employer, of a special incentive to retire at a particular time, beyond that provided by the firm's pension plan. While such windows have attracted increasing attention in the academic literature and the business press, most of our current knowledge...

Using data from the BLS Industry Wage Survey, the author tests the theory that firms choose their methods of pay by balancing the gains from more precise links between performance and pay against monitoring costs. The results confirm most of the predictions from the general theory. For example,...

By collecting annual economic and demographic information from a large and representative sample of U.S. households for over a quarter century, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics has compiled a remarkably useful set of microdata. This article describes the PSID and how its unique longitudinal...

We analyze the relationship between how long an employer has been in business (firm age) and wages. Using data from special supplements to the Survey Research Center's monthly Survey of Consumers, we find that firms that have been in business longer pay higher wages (as previous studies found),...