A proportion of employees are overqualified for their work. This generates a wage premium relative to the job but a penalty relative to the qualification, and is therefore, a puzzle for human capital theory. A part of this derives from the use of measures of time spent in education for the calculation of overqualification. Analysing data from four…

This study examines the relative earnings of black men from a time series perspective covering 1930 to 1990. Regression analyses were fitted to annual data to isolate factors responsible for changes in relative earnings. National and regional data on population growth and employment growth by industry were analyzed to determine the degree of…

The paper suggests some reasons why regional income-flow differentials, through the migration of labor, have not been very effective in equalizing regional wage rates and income in depressed areas such as the Coastal Plains. Emphasis is placed on the experience of the North Carolina Mobility Project. The author holds that mobility projects have a…

Restoration of an adequate minimum wage remains a critical ingredient in efforts to provide income security for poor and minority workers. The experience of recent years indicates that work does not provide economic security for many poor, Black, and Hispanic workers. National and minority unemployment rates have dropped during the economic…

An analysis of the argument that a market imperfection (wage differentials and queuing caused by unions) raises the marginal social product (MSP) of college education above the average before-tax private wage premium (APP) for college (this discrepancy is called a union-Q-nality) focuses on verifying five hypotheses: (1) Workers with identical…

Recent economic research has investigated the extent to which involvement in school-sponsored clubs and sports constitutes human capital investment. Through instrumental variables, the existing literature focuses on identifying long-term impacts in terms of educational attainment and wages. Instead, I use a fixed effects strategy to test whether…

From a random sample of 14,596 White males aged 25-64, earnings of those who were employed full time, year round were analyzed. Results show that overeducated workers--those with educational attainments substantially above the mean for their occupations--often earn less than their adequately educated and undereducated counterparts. (SK)

This paper compares relative earnings by sex among university faculty members as estimated from both cross-section and longitudinal data samples. Results indicate substantial differences in estimated male-female salary ratios. (TE)

A model of occupational choice based on the theory of human capital is developed and estimated by conditional logit analysis. The empirical results estimated the probability of individuals with certain characteristics (such as race, sex, age, and education) entering each of 11 occupational groups. The results indicate that individuals tend to…

The study of labor supply is directed to a theoretical methodology under which the choice of the general functional form of the income-leisure preference structure may be regarded as an empirical question. The author has reviewed the common functional forms employed in empirical labor supply models and has characterized the inherent preference…

Examines two opposing positions of economists about immigration's impacts. Reports empirical analysis of wages and employment effects of recent undocumented aliens and settled migrants on native-born workers. Separate native-born worker estimates are provided for men and women, subdivided by race and Spanish origin. (FMW)

Two contrasting trends concerning gender and racial wage levels for U.S. workers emerged in the 1980s. The first trend, which is gender-related, is that women made tremendous gains in their wages relative to those of men: in 1978 women earned 61 percent as much as men, while by 1990 that figure rose to 72 percent. Furthermore, these gains extended…

Most economists agree that the difficulties of targeting minimum wage increases to low-income families make such increases ineffective tools for reducing poverty. This paper provides estimates of the impact of minimum wage increases on the poverty gap and the number of poor families, and shows which factors are barriers to decreasing poverty…

This paper discusses American long-term experience with changes in the distribution of income since the turn of the century. It supplies quantitative documentation of a pronunced secular swing in inequality. Inequality indicators were on the rise up to 1914, exhibited no trend to 1926 or 1929, and traced out a well known egalitatian leveling up to…

Reports on a study of Black and White male workers aged 32 or less, who had established their own residences and had worked full time for 10 years or less. The study explored the relationships among such variables as parental income, educational background, job tenure, and workers' earnings. (PGD)