This article attempts to determine whether wage records reported by employers to state unemployment insurance (UI) agencies provide a valid alternative to more costly retrospective sample surveys of individuals as the basis for measuring the impacts of employment and training programs for low‐income persons. We analyze UI data and survey data for a sample of low‐income adults and youths from 12 sites in the National Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) study. Our comparison indicates that impact estimates based on UI data and survey data were usually comparable. However, average surveyreported earnings were higher than average UI‐reported earnings.

Empirical models of local government unionization reveal substantial reductions in union membership due to right-to-work laws. Free riders, rather than underlying antiunion sentiments, are probably responsible because the unionization models include better measures of sentiments than right-to-work laws. Furthermore, these laws reduce the probability that bargaining unions form by more than they reduce the probability that nonbargaining associations form in three of five local government functions. These results also confirm the importance of free riders because union security clauses that prohibit free riders in states without right-to-work laws exist only in collective-bargaining contracts.

"This paper develops a model of the transmission of earnings, assets, and consumption from parents to descendants. The model assumes utility-maximizing parents who are concerned about the welfare of their children. The degree of intergenerational mobility is determined by the interaction of this utility-maximizing behavior with investment and consumption opportunities in different generations and with different kinds of luck. We examine a number of empirical studies for different countries. Regression to the mean in earnings in rich countries appears to be rapid. Almost all the earnings advantages or disadvantages of ancestors are wiped out in three generations." A comment by Robert J. Willis is included (pp. 40-7).

Military assignment mechanisms provide a unique opportunity to estimate the impact of high-performing mentors on job advancement of their subordinates. Combining US Army administrative data with officer evaluation reports, we find that high-performing mentors positively affect early junior officer promotion and that early promotion probabilities rise as the duration of the high-quality mentorship increases. These effects are largest for high-ability protégés. Junior officers who were exposed to multiple high-performing mentors did not experience an additional increase in promotion rates.

This article reports on household survey measurements of the “offshorability” of jobs, defined as the ability to perform the work from abroad. We develop multiple measures of offshorability, using both self-reporting and professional coders. All measures find that roughly 25% of US jobs are offshorable. Our three preferred measures agree between 70% and 80% of the time. Professional coders appear to provide the most accurate assessments. Empirically, more educated workers appear to hold somewhat more offshorable jobs, and offshorability does not have systematic effects on either wages or the probability of layoff.

This article examines the responses of black and white workers to their employer's relocation from downtown Detroit to suburban Dearborn. Estimates of move and quit probabilities demonstrate that white employees whose commutes lengthened because of the relocation were more likely to move, but no more likely to quit, than white employees whose commute shortened. Black employees whose commutes lengthened were more likely to both move and quit in the wake of the relocation. In effect, the restrictions on black residential choice imposed by segregation forced approximately 11.3% of black workers to quit in the wake of the relocation.

We specify a model of municipal labor demand when resource flows available to the municipality are uncertain. The model allows us to test the hypothesis that employment decisions are rational in the sense that they incorporate all available information at the time that the decisions are made. We find that, for our sample of communities, on the whole one cannot reject the hypothesis that labor demand is consistent with intertemporal utility maximization under uncertainty. However, small and large communities exhibit different behavior. The employment decisions of small communities are consistent with the model, while those of large communities are not.

A formal model of occupational choice is developed that shows the extent to which the compensation for increased duration exceeds that for increased risk. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics linked to industry data on injuries and unemployment, we find nearly all the compensating wage differential for losses due to workplace injuries is for increases in the duration of loss and similarly for losses due to cyclical unemployment. The compensating differentials for risk of injury are larger for union than for nonunion workers, while those for cyclical unemployment are smaller for union workers.

Our paper simulates the likely effects of a comparable-worth wage-adjustment policy in the state and local sector on female employment in the sector. The simulation is based on estimates of within-occupation male/female substitution and across-occupation occupational employment substitution that we obtain using data from the 1980 Census of Population.

This paper examines the effect of earnings taxes on wage variability over time. We estimate a "hedonic wage locus," which indicates how the market allows individuals to substitute the mean level of the wage for its variability across jobs. Information from this locus is used to estimate the parameters of individuals' indifference curves between the mean and temporal variation of hourly wages. On the basis of these utility-function parameters, we predict that lowering the rate of taxation on earnings would on average lead workers to choose jobs with slightly lower pretax mean wages and with less pretax wage variation.