"This paper uses combinations of full brothers, half brothers, and fathers and sons to measure the effect of common family background on a household's income and wealth. While the data are drawn from a nineteenth-century [U.S.] population, the intraclass correlation for income ranges from .13 to .18, which is similar to that found in modern samples. Intraclass correlations for wealth are significantly higher (.18-.35) than are those for income. Intraclass correlations of half brothers compared to those for full brothers suggest that fathers play a dominant role in the transmission of the common family effect. When unobserved background is decomposed into individual and family effects, the individual effect dominates the family effect for income, while the family effect dominates the individual effect for wealth." A comment by Sherwin Rosen is included (pp. 80-2).

This paper uses industry price-cost margin data to estimate the extent to which unions reduce profits. Estimates allowing for the endogeneity of union status are contrasted with estimates that assume union status is exogenous and not determined in part by either profitability or industry structure. Endogeneity is found to be an important consideration in estimating the union impact on profits: two-stage estimates are considerably larger than OLS estimates. The final section explores the total estimated redistribution from capital to labor in the manufacturing sector. An important conclusion is that unions raise prices less than was previously believed.

This study presents new evidence on the impacts of unionization using administrative data matching workers to employers in a regression discontinuity design. Close union elections exhibit substantial nonrandom selection or manipulation. Estimates accounting for this selection show that unionization substantially decreases payroll, employment, average worker earnings, and establishment survival. Payroll and earnings decreases are driven by composition changes, with older and higher-paid workers leaving unionizing establishments and younger workers joining or staying. Worker-level effects on earnings are small and are reconciled with large negative establishment-level effects in a model of employer and employee selection into union jobs.

We analyze changes in unemployment, marginal labor force attachment, and participation in Canada and the United States using consistent measurement concepts. We show the importance for the comparative evolution of aggregate unemployment of changes in the fraction of those “wanting work”—the unemployed and marginally attached. We also study changes in the fraction of the nonemployed who are unemployed. Using micro data on labor market transition behavior at these margins, we find remarkably consistent results in the two countries, with the marginally attached displaying behavior lying between unemployment and nonattachment. The three nonemployment states are distinct in both countries.

The labor supply decisions of certified elementary and high school teachers are examined using data from a general longitudinal survey. A significant decrease in the teaching participation rate takes place over time after teacher certification. Previously unavailable marital and fertility variables provide new insight into reasons for this decrease. Descriptive statistics indicate that high‐ability teachers choose to teach a smaller proportion of time than other teachers. A dynamic, discrete‐choice model, which accommodates Serial Correlation in the wage process for teachers, is used to analyze responsiveness of the overall sample and different types of teachers to two potential types of wage increases.

I study workers' incentives to invest in general human capital (education) in the presence of search‐induced unemployment. Workers queue for jobs, and firms prefer to hire the most productive applicants because of rent sharing. As a result, an unemployed worker's ranking relative to other job seekers will influence his job‐finding rate. This creates a “rat race,” where workers invest in education partly in order to achieve a better ranking. In equilibrium, identical workers may have incentives to diversify in terms of education, and the investments in education may exceed the socially optimal level.

"This article utilizes an exact match file between the 1978 March [U.S.] Current Population Survey and administrative records from the Social Security Administration to analyze errors in the reporting of annual income using nonparametric methodology.... Three new findings are of interest: there is higher measurement error in cross-sectional samples than in panels. The negative relationship between measurement error and earnings is driven largely by overreporting among low earners. Median response errors are not related to earnings."

The General Social Surveys Cumulative Data File is used to analyze the schooling, occupational status, and earnings of American Jews. Jews are identified by a question on religion at age 16. The analysis focuses on trends within the survey period and intergenerational changes from the father to the respondent. Ceteris paribus, Jews have significantly higher levels of schooling, occupational status, and earnings than other whites, and within the survey period there is no trend in the differential. The Jewish fathers also had higher levels of achievement than other fathers, but the differentials increased from the father's to the respondent's generation.

This article is concerned with the determinants of English-language fluency among immigrants and the effects of fluency on earnings. Using special survey data on a sample of over eight hundred aliens, the analysis shows the importance of certain variables not previously available, speaking fluency at migration and English reading fluency. English speaking and reading fluency both increase with duration in the United States, and the increase with duration is greater for those with more schooling and who are not Hispanic. The article shows that reading fluency is more important than speaking fluency as a determinant of earnings.

The federal-private wage differential is reexamined with recent data. Using specifications similar to those used in three previous studies, I find that the federal-private wage differential has narrowed since the 1974-79 period analyzed in those studies. In addition, I discover that wage differentials based on specifications used in the literature are biased upward because the previous studies did not control for detailed occupational and locational characteristics of workers. Corrected point estimates of the wage gap are much smaller than previous estimates in the literature. Differences in the gap across demographic groups, occupations, and locations are also discussed.