Two key attributes of a job are its wage and its duration. Much has been made of changes in the wage distribution in the 1980s but little attention has been given to job durations since Robert E. Hall (1972, 1982). The authors fill this void by examining the temporal evolution of job retention rates in U.S. labor markets using data assembled from the sequence of Current Population Survey job tenure supplements. There have been relative declines in job stability for some of the groups that experienced the sharpest declines in relative wages. However, the authors find that aggregate job retention rates have remained stable.

We use a unique new data set that combines data on individual workers and their employers to estimate marginal productivity differentials among different types of workers. We then compare these to estimated relative wages, leading to new evidence on productivity‐based and nonproductivity‐based explanations of the determination of wages. Among our findings are (1) the higher pay of prime‐aged workers (aged 35–54) and older workers (aged 55+) is reflected in higher point estimates of their relative marginal products, and (2) for the most part, the lower relative earnings of women are not reflected in lower relative marginal products.

After-hours pricing in foreign equity markets of multiple-listed U.S. securities appeared to be efficient in predicting New York prices in the weeks immediately following the October 1987 crash but relatively uninformative in succeeding months. By contrast, daily changes in New York prices appear to be efficiently incorporated in after-hours trading on both the Tokyo and London exchanges throughout the sample period. This paper suggests that the asymmetry and temporal variations in cross-market correlations are consistent with rational investor behavior in equity markets with nonzero transaction costs and time-varying share price volatility. IN THE WAKE OF the October 1987 crash, a number of studies have provided evidence of significant international linkages among national equity markets where high-frequency movements in the share price indices of national exchanges appear to induce sympathetic price movements in subsequent trading on other national exchanges.' However, the cross-market correlations are generally much larger in periods of extreme volatility and appear to subside to modest or even negligible associations during periods of more normal trading activity. Since the constituent stocks of national exchange indices are not identical, it may be that the episodic increases in correlated movements of the indices are due to changes in the actual (or perceived) relative importance of common factors in periods of unusual volatility. The thrust of this paper is to remove the issue of the disparate composition of the price indices of national exchanges by examining the prices of a set of

After‐hours pricing in foreign equity markets of multiple‐listed U.S. securities appeared to be efficient in predicting New York prices in the weeks immediately following the October 1987 crash but relatively uninformative in succeeding months. By contrast, daily changes in New York prices appear to be efficiently incorporated in after‐hours trading on both the Tokyo and London exchanges throughout the sample period. This paper suggests that the asymmetry and temporal variations in cross‐market correlations are consistent with rational investor behavior in equity markets with nonzero transaction costs and time‐varying share price volatility.

We examine evidence on omitted-ability bias in estimates of the economic return to schooling, using proxies for unobserved ability. We consider measurement error in these ability proxies and the potential endogeneity of both experience and schooling, and examine wages at labor market entry and later. Including ability proxies reduces the estimate of the return to schooling, and instrumenting for these proxies reduces the estimated return still further. Instrumenting for schooling leads to considerably higher estimates of the return to schooling, although only for wages at labor market entry. This estimated return generally reverts to being near (although still above) the OLS estimate if we allow experience to be endogenous. In contrast, for observations at least a few years after labor market entry, the evidence indicates that OLS estimates of the return to schooling that ignore omitted ability are, if anything, biased upward rather than downward.

Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Comment by David Neumark and William Wascher. Published in volume 90, issue 5, pages 1362-1396 of American Economic Review, December 2000

The Interaction of Public Retirement Income Programs in the United States by Elizabeth T. Powers and David Neumark. Published in volume 93, issue 2, pages 261-265 of American Economic Review, May 2003

Hostile takeovers may reduce the prevalence of long-term employment contracts if they facilitate the opportunistic expropriation of extramarginal wage payments. Our tests of two versions of the expropriation hypothesis improve on existing research by using firm- and establishment-level data from an employer salary survey, and by performing both ex ante and ex post tests. First, we study the relationship between proxies for extramarginal wage payments and subsequent hostile takeover activity, and find little evidence of an expropriation motive. Then. since we observe wage and employment structures both before and after takeovers. we investigate whether proxies for extramarginal wages drop after hostile takeovers. The ex post experiments provide evidence consistent with one version of the expropriation hypothesis. In particular, such takeovers appear to reduce extramarginal wage payments to more-tenured workers, mostly through flattening wage-seniority profiles in firms with relatively senior work forces.

We examine firm responses to state hiring and investment subsidies. We leverage institutional features of the California Competes Tax Credit (CCTC), a large-scale business incentive program that incorporates best practices from prior job creation policies. The CCTC award selection procedure combines formula-based and discretionary components. Leveraging applicant score eligibility cutoffs in a regression discontinuity design and taking advantage of rich longitudinal microdata on establishments and their parent firms, we find that businesses expand employment in California in response to CCTC awards. There is little evidence that these expansions come at the expense of firms’ operations in other states. Our results suggest that targeted and audited hiring and investment subsidies can be effective in promoting local business expansions without inducing significant cross-state displacement effects.