This article uses 1990 census data to study the effects of immigrant inflows on occupation-specific labor market outcomes. I find that intercity mobility rates of natives and earlier immigrants are insensitive to immigrant inflows. However, occupation-specific wages and employment rates are systematically lower in cities with higher relative supplies of workers in a given occupation. The results imply that immigrant inflows over the 1980s reduced wages and employment rates of low-skilled natives in traditional gateway cities like Miami and Los Angeles by 1-3 percentage points.

This article presents an empirical study of strike activity in a panel of contract negotiations for some 250 firm-and-union pairs. Evidence is presented on two sources of variation in dispute rates: changes in the characteristics of the collective bargaining agreement that affect subsequent strike outcomes and the effects of lagged strikes on the incidence and duration of subsequent disputes. Strike probabilities are significantly affected by the duration and expiration month of the previous agreement. Dispute rates are also increased by the occurrence of a short strike during the previous negotiations and reduced by the occurrence of a long strike.

Cost of living escalators are an important feature of North American labor contracts. This paper presents a measure of the response of indexlinked wage increases to concurrent price increases for a sample of Canadian contracts, and then analyses this response in terms of a simple model of indexation to the aggregate price level. The model highlights the importance of aggregate price movements in conveying information about industryspecific prices. The empirical analysis confirms that industry-specific correlations between input and output prices and the Consumer Price Index are important determinants of the response of wage to prices across index contracts.

Orley Ashenfelter, David Card, Using the Longitudinal Structure of Earnings to Estimate the Effect of Training Programs, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Nov., 1985), pp. 648-660

We review Immigration Economics by George J. Borjas, published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. The book is written as a graduate-level textbook, and summarizes and updates many of Borjas's important contributions to the field over the past thirty years. A key message of the book is that immigration poses significant costs to many members of the host-country labor market. Though the theoretical and econometric approaches presented in the book will be very useful for students and specialists in the field, we argue that the book presents a one-sided view of immigration, with little or no attention to the growing body of work that offers a more nuanced picture of how immigrants fit into the host-country market and affect native workers.

We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit into four subintervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a good approximation to the wage structure and can explain nearly all of the dramatic rise in West German wage inequality. Our estimates suggest that the increasing dispersion of West German wages has arisen from a combination of rising heterogeneity between workers, rising dispersion in the wage premiums at different establishments, and increasing assortativeness in the assignment of workers to plants. In contrast, the idiosyncratic job-match component of wage variation is small and stable over time. Decomposing changes in mean wages between different education groups, occupations, and industries, we find that increasing plant-level heterogeneity and rising assortativeness in the assignment of workers to establishments explain a large share of the rise in inequality along all three dimensions.

School quality affects upward mobility in educational attainment. This conclusion comes from an analysis of families with coresident teenage children in the 1940 census. We study parents in the bottom quartile of the education distribution and define “upward mobility” as a generational move up the educational ladder to the top three quartiles of the child’s cohort. At the state level, upward mobility is strongly tied to teacher wages. This relationship holds when we narrow our focus to families on adjacent sides of state borders in the South, where state minimum salary laws created sharp teacher-wage differences between otherwise similar counties.

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We study social interactions in the initiation of sex and other risky behaviors by best friend pairs in the Add Health panel. Focusing on friends with minimal experience at the baseline interview, we estimate bivariate ordered-choice models that include both peer effects and unobserved heterogeneity. We find significant peer effects in sexual initiation: the likelihood of initiating intercourse within a year increases by almost 5 percentage points (on an 11% base rate) if one's friend also initiates intercourse. Similar effects are present for smoking, marijuana use, and truancy. We find larger effects for females and important asymmetries in nonreciprocated friendships.

We synthesize two related literatures on firm-level drivers of wage inequality. Studies of rent sharing that use matched worker-firm data find elasticities of wages with respect to value added per worker in the range of 0.05–0.15. Studies of wage determination with worker and firm fixed effects typically find that firm-specific premiums explain 20% of overall wage variation. To interpret these findings, we develop a model of wage setting in which workers have idiosyncratic tastes for different workplaces. Simple versions of this model can rationalize standard fixed effects specifications and also match the typical rent-sharing elasticities in the literature.