An overview of the proceedings of the October 1989 Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland conference on the causes and consequences of structural changes in U.S. labor markets.

Inflation has been accused of causing distortionary prices and wage fluctuations (sand) as well as lauded for facilitating adjustments to shocks when wages are rigid downwards (grease). This paper investigates whether these two effects can be distinguished from each other in a labor market by...

An examination of the intensity of supervision in the workplace and its effect on the pay of nonsupervisory employees through the use a wage survey of the hospital industry.

An analysis of the variance of wages within and between industries, finding that wage differences are virtually stationary over time and are related to establishment size.

This paper decomposes the observed wage difference between male and female workers into the portions associated with three types of segregation and with the individual's sex. The contribution of each type of segregation is the product of two factors: the extent of segregation and the wage...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals’ earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals' earnings in thirty-one different data sets from sixteen countries, from...

Has greater turbulence among firms fueled rising wage instability in the United States? Earlier research by Gottschalk and Moffitt shows that rising earnings instability was responsible for one-third to one-half of the rise in wage inequality during the 1980s. These growing transitory...

This paper discusses how optimal monetary policy is affected by differences in the combination of shocks an economy experiences and the rigidities it exhibits. Without both nominal rigidities and economic shocks, monetary policy would be irrelevant. Recognizing this, policymakers increasingly...