Using data from the 1976 Current Population Survey, finds that while there are significant earnings costs due to the differential allocation of minority labor into the labor intensive sector of the economy, the dollar costs of the differential evaluation of minority credentials are far greater. (Author/GC)

Utilizes a human capital model to estimate sectoral earnings functions for three groups of Kuwait workers, using 1983 national labor survey data. Results suggest that public-sector workers earn more than private-sector workers, that competitive forces and education effects are greater in the private sector, and that nationals earn substantially…

Michael Kirst's article "Strengths and Weaknesses of American Education" in the April 1993 "Kappan" applauds U.S. efforts to become globally competitive. However, assembling cars in Mexico or exporting jobs to Korea blurs the distinction between national/corporate "teams." The issue is not talent but cheap talent.…

The seven papers use data from particular industries to examine the nature and causes of recent changes in earnings equality in the United States. They provide perspectives from banking, telecommunications, semiconductors, steel, grocery, truck driving, apparel, and imaging industries on recent debates regarding the influence that technological…

This article investigates the phenomenon of long-term unemployed graduates of Norwegian higher education institutions over the period 1973-1999. The phenomenon was unexpected. One explanation for it is that the market for graduates was and remains in disequilibrium because wages are not sufficiently flexible downward. Thus unemployment would be…

This paper studies the assignment of heterogeneous workers to heterogeneous jobs. Owing to the anonymity of a large labor market, workers use mixed strategies when applying for jobs. This randomness generates coordination frictions. Two workers may apply for a particular job, whereas an identical job gets no applications. The model generates…

This paper examines the impact of college quality and academic major on the earnings of a nationally representative sample of baccalaureate recipients. We extend previous work in this area by analyzing the magnitude of change in the influence of these factors at two points in the early career of these graduates. Our results demonstrate that,…

The expansion of the higher education system and widening access to undergraduate study has led to growing diversity within the graduate labour supply, including increasing numbers who studied for their degrees as mature students. Analysis of graduates entering the labour market prior to the major expansion in the early 1990s indicated that those…

When chronicling how less-skilled workers have fared in the U.S. since the late 1970's, existing literature often cites their falling wages and declining participation in the labor force. Most research describing these trends, however, focuses primarily on men, failing to account for the fact that less-skilled women's real wages have not fallen,…

This study uses hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to analyze the effect of human capital, structural characteristics of the discipline, and disciplinary labor market conditions on faculty salaries. Faculty in disciplines characterized by relatively low demand, high teaching loads, and low amounts of research funding earn less than do faculty in…

Since 1998, federally funded One-Stop Service Centers around the country have focused primarily on assisting the unemployed into work. WASC tests a strategy that expands that mission by targeting people who are already working, but at low wages. Through career coaching, skills training, and better connections with employers - and led by a newly…

This volume presents 6 papers by 22 labor economists who examine and address worker displacement in 10 industrialized countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Netherlands, United States). "Summary and Synthesis" (Peter J. Kuhn) discusses these four categories of lessons learned from panel…

The most prominent theories of unemployment that have emerged since 1960 are search, disequilibrium, implicit contracts, efficiency wage, and insider/outsider models. Search models assume that it takes time and effort for employers and potential employees to find each other. A "partial-partial" equilibrium approach focuses on one side of…

In this paper, the life cycle and comparative static models of time are used to interpret household behavior as measured by data collected in the Time Use Survey, a national probability sample of U.S. households conducted by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan in 1975-76. Also, some time-series comparisons are made by…

Two models of the duration of stay on welfare are developed and estimated using panel data from the California Aid to Families with Dependent Children AFDC panel survey. The first model characterizes the distribution of length of stay on welfare as drawn from the lognormal distribution with a truncation at the duration of the experiment (sixty…