This paper describes changes in hours of work and income between 1959 and 1979 of women and men ages 25-64. It includes attempts to measure and value nonmarket production and leisure as well as market work, to take account of possible income sharing within households, and to allow for economies of scale in household production. The most important empirical result is that, relative to men, women's access to goods and services and leisure was lower in 1979 than in 1959. Changes in hourly earnings, hours of work, and household structure contributed to this result. The sex differential in hourly earnings is explored in detail.

"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 paper analyzes trends in the skills of immigrants to the US in the post-World War II period. Changes in the supply, demand, and institutional factors determining immigration are analyzed for their implications for immigrant skills. During the past 4 decades immigration has shifted from being predominantly European and Canadian in origin to being predominantly Asian and Latin American, and there have been changes in the criteria for rationing immigration visas. Immigrant skills can be analyzed within the context of a model of the supply of immigrants and the US demand for immigrants. Of the Asian immigrants subject to numerical limitation, the proportion who were occupational preference principals declined from 18.2% in 1970, to 11.9% in 1975, to 8.1% in 1981. A growing stock of the foreign-born population who are illegal aliens may lower immigrant quality; for low-skilled workers in neighboring low-income countries the economic incentives for illegal migration are very large. Immigrants from the UK have the highest annual earnings, with Canadian, other European, South Asian, East Asian, and other American immigrants having successively lower earnings. The Mexicans and the Vietnamese have the lowest earnings. Over the period 1950 to 1980, US immigration changed from primarily drawing immigrants from countries whose nationals have high relative earnings in the US primarily drawing immigrants from countries whose nationals do less well. Recent immigrants are less favorably selected on the basis of their level of schooling. The analysis of the relative earnings of immigrants during the 1970s using 3 data files shows there has been little change for white immigrants, an ambiguous pattern for Mexican immgrants, perhaps a small decline for Cuban immigrants, and a small rise for Asian immigrants. Overall, without returning to rationing by country of origin, public policy could raise immigrant skill levels by changing the balance between kinship and the individual's skills in the rationing of visas.

"Birth-order effects are posited by many to affect earnings and schooling. We show how such effects can be interpreted to shift either the earnings possibility frontier for siblings or parental preferences. We find empirical evidence for birth-order effects on (age-adjusted) schooling and on earnings for young U.S. adults, though the latter is not robust for all specifications. The examination of intrahousehold allocations suggests that these birth-order differences occur despite parental preferences or prices by birth order favoring later borns, apparently because of stronger endowment effects that favor first borns."