Large and persistent differences across industries in wages paid for given occupations have commonly been observed. Recently, the efficiency wage model (EWM) has been advanced as an explanation for these wage differentials. The shirking version of the EWM assumes a trade-off between...

A major cause of unemployment, distinct from inadequate aggregate demand and instability of workers, is the instability of jobs themselves. In an average year about one in every nine jobs disappear and one in every eight is newly created. This is based on an analysis of year to year employment...

Recent arguments that employment growth occurs disproportionately at small establishments are fundamentally misleading because they confuse regression to the mean with structural shifts in the size distribution of establishments and with an aging effect within cohorts. The net growth usually...

This paper reviews some recent empirical analyses of the impact of affirmative action and anti-discrimination law on employment and productivity.The major findings are that:1)Affirmative action has some success in improving employment opportunities for minorities and females, particularly for...

Affirmative action goals and timetables for the employment of minorities and females have been criticized by some as being ineffective,and by others as being a system of rigid quotas. Using new data from OFCCP administrative records, this paper estimates the impact of detailed regulatory...

Affirmative action may be broadly conceived of as pursuing either the goal of reducing discrimination or that of redistributing jobs and earnings. I attempt to infer the ends of affirmative action policy by analyzing the historical record of enforcement. Optimal enforcement strategies are...

Critics have said that affirmative action is at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. In particular, it has been argued that if affirmative action helps anybody, it helps only the highly educated cream of the minority population, and may perversely work to the detriment of the...

This paper analyzes differences in the growth of minority and female employment between union and non-union manufacturing plants in California during the late 1970's, In this sector, unionized plants do not exhibit anymore gross employment discrimination than do nonunion plants against black or...

Affirmative action under Executive Order 11246 ranks among the most controversial of domestic federal policies.This study asks whether affirmative action has been successful in promoting the employment of minorities and females. It compares the change in demographics between 1974 and 1980 at...

This paper seeks to disentangle the impactof residential segregation from that of employment discrimination in determining black employment share. The major finding is that distance of a workplace from the main ghetto is one of the strongest and most significant determinants of both changes over...