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...

Microcredit—the distribution of small, uncollateralized but jointly liable loans to the poorest of the poor—has been touted as a powerful approach for combatting global poverty. While some microcredit programs enjoy high repayment rates, others face unsustainably high default rates. Efforts...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPH) says that the responsiveness of asset-demands to expected returns depends (inversely) on the variance-covariance matrix of returns, rather than being an arbitrary set of parameters.Previous tests of CAPM have usually computed covariances of returns around...

The law prohibits firms from moving work to avoid unionization. Still, many employees fear that joining a union may cost them their jobs. This paper assesses the impact of that fear on how clerical workers vote in union certification elections. Two data sets were collected and analyzed for this...

This paper investigates the correlates of union success in NLRB certification and decertification elections. The analysis includes a wide variety of bargaining unit, union, industry, and geographic attributes, many of which have not been considered in previous studies. Variables having a...

Several efficiency wage theories of wage determination have the property that identical workers are more productive in high wage industries and that the promotion of employment in high wage industries can increase GDP (and some measures of welfare). I argue that while policies to favor high wage...

Although intuitively appealing, the use of hedonic wage estimates to determine people's willingness to pay to avoid the risk of fatal hazards is fraught with problems. The theoretical basis for such estimates are flawed in a number of important ways. The underlying behavioral model is wrong,...