A comparison of the correlations between brothers and neighboring boys in their adult earnings suggests that the earnings resemblance between brothers stems more from growing up in the same family than from growing up in the same neighborhood. Much of the neighbor correlation is explicable in terms of the large earnings differential between urban and nonurban areas combined with the strength with which urbanicity of childhood neighborhood predicts urbanicity of adult location. This pattern is subject to a variety of interpretations, but it is quite different from the usual view of neighborhood effects.

Using an extraordinary database drawn from longitudinal income tax records, we decompose Canada’s growth in earnings inequality into its persistent and transitory components. We find that the growth in earnings inequality reflects both an increase in long‐run inequality and an increase in earnings instability. The Canadian data strongly reject several restrictions commonly imposed in the U.S. literature, and they also suggest that imposing these evidently false restrictions may lead to distorted inferences about earnings dynamics and inequality trends.

This paper presents a wage-bargaining model in which the employer and employee are each uncertain about the other's reservation wage. Under specified circumstances, the model's equilibrium is shown to involve unilateral wage setting and inefficient labor turnover. In addition, aggregate demand shocks affect the equilibrium in a way that produces procyclical quits and countercyclical layoffs. These results are obtained without resorting to assumptions of nominal wage rigidity, long-term contracting, or aggregate price misperceptions.

Using 1979–2012 CPS data for the United States and 1975–2012 NES data for Great Britain, we study wage behavior in both countries, with particular attention to the Great Recession. Real wages are procyclical in both countries, but the procyclicality of real wages varies across recessions, and does so differently between the two countries, in ways that defy simple explanations. We devote particular attention to the hypothesis that downward nominal wage rigidity plays an important role in cyclical employment and unemployment fluctuations. We conclude that downward wage rigidity may be less binding and have lesser allocative consequences than is often supposed.