Workers with high seniority usually have higher wages than workers with low seniority and the same total labor-market experience. In contrast, the results of this paper indicate that for university professors higher seniority is associated with lower salaries. I document this finding for national surveys and individual institutions and explain it as due to monopsonistic discrimination by employers.

According to the family utility function approach, the labor supply functions of married men should differ according to whether their wives also work. In this paper, I explicitly model the switching nature of labor supply while also accounting for the endogeneity of the labor force participation decision of the wife, using an endogenous switching regressions model based on the quadratic family utility function. The model is estimated from a cross section of 1,210 married couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

Because of the interdependent nature of family labor supply decisions, the nonnegativity constrai nt on women's hours of work will spill over into other consumption an d labor supply decisions of the family. Here the author develops an e conometric model of family labor supply that captures this "spillove r, " while addressing the usual censoring issues as well. The model i s based on a flexible direct utility function and permits unobservabl e differences in tastes. The model is estimated by the maximum likeli hood method on a sample of about 1, 200 families from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

Workers with high seniority usually have higher wages than workers with low seniority and the same total labor-marke t experience. In contrast, the results of this paper indicate that higher seniority is associated with lower salaries for university professors. The author documents this finding for national surveys a nd individual institutions and explains it as due to monopsonistic discrimination by employers.

In the context of certain models, it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage. We use this strategy to estimate the elasticity of labor supply for men and women workers at a chain of grocery stores, identifying separation elasticities from differences in wages and separation rates across different job titles within the firm. We estimate that women have lower elasticities, so a Robinson‐style monopsony model can explain reasonably well the lower relative pay of women in the retail grocery industry.

In the context of certain dynamic models, it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage. Using this property, we estimate the average labor supply elasticity to public school districts in Missouri. We leverage the plausibly exogenous variation in prenegotiated district salary schedules to instrument for actual salary. These estimates imply a labor supply elasticity of about 3.7, suggesting that school districts possess significant market power. The presence of monopsony power in this teacher labor market may be partially explained by its institutional features.

[In this paper we consider the lognormal, gamma, beta, and Singh-Maddala functions as descriptive models for the distribution of family income for 1960 and 1969 through 1975. Least squares and two efficient estimation techniques are used to estimate the unknown parameters. Alternative functional forms for comparable estimation techniques can then be contrasted and estimation techniques for a given functional form can be compared. We note that estimates of population characteristics depend upon the functional form and estimation technique selected.]

The standard wage decomposition methodology produces arbitrary results when attempting to estimate the separate contributions of sets of dummy variables to the unexplained portion of the wage decomposition: the estimates are not invariant with respect to the choice of reference groups. However, the estimated separate contributions of sets of dummy variables to the explained portion and the overall decomposition are shown not to be dependent upon the choice of left-out reference groups. A similar identification problem applies to continuous variables, although this may not be as likely to cause problems in practice.