Data from the National Income and Product Accounts published by the US federal government make it possible to analyze the growth of state and local government employee compensation by state.

Studies relying upon household survey data have concluded that public school teachers receive substantially lower salaries than comparably-educated private sector workers. However, any given level of formal educational attainment found in household surveys can encompass a wide range of skills as...

Children consume a substantial portion of a household's income while living at home, but are usually financially independent by the time the parents reach retirement age.

The key insight of the life cycle model in economics is that a household's consumption at any given time is determined not so much by its current income as by the total income available to the household over its lifetime. A replacement rate can be a useful tool in approximating the life cycle...

This paper ranks all 50 states according to how costly their public-employee compensation packages are relative to private-sector standards. Each state's package is placed into one of five categories: modest penalty, market level, modest premium, large premium, or very large premium. The results...