We provide a comprehensive view of widening income inequality in the United States contrasting conditions since 1980 with those in earlier postwar years. We argue that the income distribution in each period was strongly shaped by a set of economic institutions. The early postwar years were...

This paper presents an approximate method for estimating the labor supply function of female household heads who may or may not be receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Estimation results indicate that any AFDC parameter change which increases a program's breakeven income...

This paper places the competencies to be measured by the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) in the context of the technological developments which are reshaping the nature of the workplace and work in the 21st century. The largest technological...

One of the implicit promises of capitalism is that, as output per hour of work increases, its beneits are shared by business and labor. In a recent paper, MIT economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin show that the relationship no longer holds. Productivity has grown more rapidly than wages since...