During the 1980s wage differentials between younger and older workers and between more and less educated workers expanded rapidly. Wage dispersion among individuals with the same age and education also rose. A simple explanation for both sets of facts is that earnings represent a return to a...

The province of Ontario has two publicly funded school systems: secular schools (known as public schools) that are open to all students, and separate schools that are open to children with Catholic backgrounds. The systems are administered independently and receive equal funding per student. In...

We study the rate of wage growth among welfare leavers in the Self Sufficiency Program (SSP), an experimental earnings subsidy offered to long-term welfare recipients in Canada. Single parents who started working in response to the SSP incentive are younger, less educated, and have more young...

The imposition of a national wage standard sets up a useful natural experiment in which the "treatment effect" varies across states depending on the fraction of workers earning less than the new minimum. I use this idea to evaluate the effect of the April 1990 increase in the Federal minimum...

The average wage differential between black and white men fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1980. Much of this convergence is attributable to a relative increase in the rate of return to schooling among black workers. It is widely argued that the growth in the relative return to...

In this paper we study the effects of school finance reforms on the distribution of school spending across richer and poorer districts, and the effects of spending equalization on the distribution of student outcomes across children from different family backgrounds. We use school district data...

This paper describes a simple model of labor disputes based on the hypothesis that unions use strikes to infer the level of profitability of the firm. The implications of the model are then tested using data on wage outcomes, strike probabilities, and strike durations for a large sample of...

Despite several decades of research there is still widespread disagreement over the interpretation of the wage differences between black and white workers. Do the differences reflect productivity differences, discrimination, or both? If lower black earnings reflect a productivity difference,...

This paper presents an overview and interpretation of the literature relating school quality to students' subsequent labor market success. We begin with a simple theoretical model that describes the determination of schooling and earnings with varying school quality. A key insight of the model...

In the SSP Applicant Experiment, a random sample of new welfare entrants was informed that if they remained on welfare for a year they would become eligible for a generous earnings subsidy. Those who satisfied the waiting period and then left welfare and began working full time within the...