It is well known that the long-term unemployed fare worse in the labor market than the short-term unemployed, but less clear why this is so. One potential explanation is that the long-term unemployed are "bad apples" who had poorer prospects from the outset of their spells (heterogeneity)....

Recent work by David Lilien has argued that the positive correlation between the dispersion of employment growth rates across sectors (a) and the unemployment rate implies that sectoral shifts in labor demand are responsible for a substantial fraction of cyclical variation in unemployment. This...

As the structure of the economy has changed over the past few decades, researchers and policy makers have been increasingly concerned with how these changes affect workers. In this book, leading economists examine a variety of important trends in the new economy, including inequality of earnings...

How college price influences student decisions about whether and where to attend college is an important issue. The District of Columbia Tuition Assistance Grant Program allows those who qualify to attend public colleges and universities in other states at considerably lower "in-state" tuitions....

In cross-sectional data, the positive association between seniority and earnings is typically much stronger for nonunion workers than for union workers, a finding that seems inconsistent with the generalization that seniority is more important in the union sector than in the nonunion sector. The...