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...

Aggregate labor cost equations tended to overpredict labor-cost inflation in the United States in the 1980s. We consider the hypothesis that a change in the price-inflation-expectations mechanism can explain this apparent structural shift in the 1980s. We examine whether the sharp recession of...

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...

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...

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...

We analyze how quits responded to arbitrary differences in own and peer wages using an unusual feature of a pay raise at a large U.S. retailer. The firm's use of discrete pay steps created discontinuities in raises, where workers earning within 1 cent of each other received new wages that...