Market hours,household work,child care,and wage rates of partners: an empirical analysis

The aim of this paper is to provide new evidence on the effect of partners’ wages on partners’ allocation of time. Earlier studies concluded that wage rates are an important determinant of partners’ hours of market and non-market work and also that house work may lower married women’s wage rates. However, the bulk of earlier literature in this area failed to account for the endogeneity of wages or the simultaneity of partners’ time allocation choices. Here we take a reduced form approach and specify a ten simultaneous equations model of wage rates, employment and hours of market work, house work and childcare of parents. Non-participants are included in the model. We exploit a rich time use dataset for France to estimate the model. We find that the own wage affects positively own market hours and negatively own house work and childcare hours. The wage of the father has a significantly negative effect on the mother’s market hours while her wage rate has a significantly positive effect on his house work hours.     

Unionization and nonunion wage patterns:

conclusion We argue that a nonunion worker’s support for unionization depends not only on the expected gain in wages, but also on the probability of retaining employment after union-ization. Incorporating this point generates no prediction that low-wage workers will receive the largest threat-induced supplements as they are the ones who are least likely to retain their jobs after unionization. In short, which group of workers will receive the largest union induced wage supplement is ambiguous.     

Conjuring up traditions: atmospheres,eras and family Christmases

Despite some macro level concern with the concepts of tradition and ‘detraditionalization’, sociologists for the most part have paid relatively little attention to the everyday realities of family traditions as they are experienced and narrated in people's lives. Based on a qualitative study of ‘Family Backgrounds and Everyday Lives’, this article explores people's experiences and narratives of family Christmases, and examines how traditions are conjured up and evoked in multi‐dimensional, embodied, emplaced and sensory ways. The article argues that in recognizing and conjuring up family practices and happenings as ‘traditions’, people create a vivid and potent sense of generational eras, atmospheres and family styles. These have a moral currency that matters – sometimes quite profoundly – in people's lives, and are the subject of debate and negotiation between, as well as within, generations. Christmas traditions, it is argued, are central in the constitution of eras not least because they enable the bundling up of time – past, present and anticipated for descendant generations – into packages of generalized ‘time out of time’, characterized by distinctive atmospheres, and around which memories can coalesce and about which stories can be told. These atmospheric eras – more than broad or macro understandings of ‘tradition’ – are central in how generational dynamics and personal family histories take shape, and how memories are ‘indexed’ in and through time.     

Recent minimum wage increases and the minimum wage labor force

Coclusion  Recently Whaples (1996) reported that most labor economists believe that minimum wage laws decrease employment. Despite this, policy makers have continued to periodically raise the minimum, with the most recent increases occurring in October 1996 and September 1997. The various analyses done by Card, Katz, and Krueger, that showed little to no employment effect of past minimum wage increases, have provided additional ammunition for those who would seek further increases. However, using the estimates of Williams and Mills (1998), we demonstrate that the latest minimum wage increases substantially decreased employment for both sexes. We believe that future increases will do likewise.     

Immigrant qualifications: recognition and relative wage outcomes

"One aim of this study is to examine the labor market outcomes of immigrants relative to the Australian born.... In particular, this article examines both the extent of formal nonrecognition of overseas qualifications and the indirect implications for wage outcomes of a lack of full recognition of qualifications. Immigrant relative wage analysis...is the subject of the second part of this article...."     

Unions and wage inequality

Summary and Conclusions The impact of unions on the structure of wages has recently attracted renewed interest as analysts have struggled to explain the rise in earnings inequality in several industrialized countries. Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States provide a potentially valuable set of countries for examining this question. All three countries now collect comparable data on wages and union status in their regular labor force surveys. Several features of the collective bargaining institutions of these countries make them suitable for studying the relationship between unions and wage inequality. Bargaining is highly decentralized; there are no general mechanisms for extending collective bargaining provisions beyond the “organized” sector; and the fraction of the work force covered by collective bargaining is relatively modest. Thus it is possible to compare the structure of wages for workers covered by union contracts to those who are not covered, and potentially infer the effect of unions on overall wage inequality.     

Segmentation and wage determination

Dans leurs écrits récents sur la segmentation socio-économique, les Américains ont utilise des données secondaires recueillies dans le secteur industriel, pour démontrer que les arguments qui veulent que les salaires soient fixés par la population active ou fonctionelle, étaient limités. A l'aide de données recueillies principalement dans des maisons de commerce canadiennes, cette étude explore les effets d'une notion alternative du fonctionnement de la segmentation, sur le processus d'établissement des salaires. En employant de nouvelles techniques de classification, on a identifié trois groupes économiques de base, et examiné les différents aspects de la fixation des salaires à l'intérieur de ces groupes économiques. On a particulièrement montré que la perspective de segmentation pouvait fournir une réinterprétation intéressante des profile réguliers de l'expérimentation des salaires.
Recent American literature on socioeconomic segmentation has employed secondary data gathered at the industrial level to demonstrate the limitations of functionalist or human capital explanations of earnings determination. In this paper, we utilize primary Canadian data collected from business establishments to explore the effects of an alternative operationalization of the segmentation notion on the wage determination process. Using some new classificatory techniques, we identify three basic economic clusters, or segments, and examine the distinctive aspects of wage determination within these economic groups. In particular, we show that the segmentation perspective can provide an interesting reinterpretation of standard experience-earning profiles.     

Nepotism and the minimum wage

That an increase in the minimum wage or minimum wage coverage results in an increase in the incidence of nepotism is empirically tested using 1972 data on job-seeking methods used by American workers. The elasticity of the incidence of nepotism with respect to the level of the minimum wage and minimum wage coverage in 1977 is estimated at between .38 and .68. I would like to thank Peter Montiel and Geoffrey Woglom for their helpful comments and suggestions and Bruce Chesebrough for providing the stimulus to write this paper; remaining errors are my own.     

Union dues and wage premiums

This study explores whether union wage premiums reflect compensating differences or noncompetitive rents. It is argued that if (1) there exists substantial dues variability, and (2) there is a positive wage-dues relation among union workers, at least part of the observed union premium is noncompetitive. Empirically, these two conditions are substantiated both within and across industries using the PSID microdata base. On average, 44 percent of the overall union premium is attributable to noncompetitive sources. Senior Economist, Office of Research and Evaluation, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Special Assistant for Policy, Evaluation and Research, U.S. Department of Labor. Comments are gratefully acknowledged from James Cunningham, H. Gregg Lewis, Wesley Mellow, William J. Moore, Jack E. Triplett and an anonymous referee. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily reflect the official position or policy of the U.S. Department of Labor.     

State minimum wage laws: Youth coverage and impact

Federal minimum wage statutes cover only 70 percent of the work force and 30 percent of all employers. State laws are designed to close some of these coverage gaps and in some cases to set higher wage floors. Hence, differences in state wage floors and coverage should affect employment rates and wage distributions, particularly among low-skilled workers. Evidence from the National Longitudinal Ssurveys of Youth is mixed, however: State wage floors appear to have no impact on youth employment or entry wages, but coverage exemptions appear to increase both employment and wages. These observations underscore the need to include state provisions in models of minimum wage impacts, particularly for later periods (e.g., 1988–1991) when state wage floors were relatively higher.     

On institutions and wage determination

This paper examines the difficulties encountered in incorporating necessary institutional features of the labor market in wage change analysis. A simple ‘institutional’ model is advanced to clarify the method and implications of the incorporation of the relevant institutional detail. Certain lacunae of the research literature are identified and the need for relations supplemental to those already identified in that literature emphasized. Further process in applied work necessitates,inter al., recognition of the endogeneity of contract length and mode.     

Unions and private wage supplements

Private wage supplements are an important part of total compensation. A model of workers’ supplement expenditures is developed which shows that, although the expenditure determinants sometimes differ between broad industry/occupation subsamples, earnings, price effects of preferential tax treatment and economies of group purchase, unionization, the product market power of the firm, and worker age are usually significant determinants of supplement expenditures. The firm’s goal of reducing turnover costs as well as demographic, locational, and industry variables also systematically affect supplement expenditures. Supplements usually increase progressively with wages, indicating that often made proportionality assumptions are invalid. This work is based on a portion of my doctoral dissertation “An Economic Analysis of the Determinants of Private Wage Supplements.” An anonymous referee made many useful suggestions and criticisms. The Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University provided some of the computer funding. The remaining errors are my responsibility.     

The shtetl in the museum: representing Jews in the eras of Stalin and Putin

This article considers the representation of the shtetl in two museum narratives devoted to Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The first, the state-funded 1939 exhibit “The Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR” was organized by the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad and remained on display to the Soviet public until the Nazi invasion in June 1941. The second is the privately funded Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. Though conceived under radically different ideological and political circumstances, each exhibition conveys a significant message about the place of Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet society, respectively, and each positions the shtetl as a formative arena for Jewish civic identity vis-à-vis the Russian homeland. Across the chasm of over seventy years, these two museum projects raise strikingly similar questions about how and why cultural institutions are mobilized to define the relationship of Ashkenazi Jews and the state. In both cases, the shtetl plays a significant role in narrating this unequal relationship.     

Sexual orientation at work: Documenting and understanding wage inequality

A growing body of research focuses on the labor market experiences and outcomes of LGBTQ+ people. Yet sexual orientation has been incorporated unevenly into research on labor market inequality, developing in parallel across work in labor economics and the sociology of work and organizations. In this review, we describe research on sexual orientation and wage inequality, bridging insights from quantitative studies of wage gaps and qualitative work on the organizational and occupational experiences of sexual minorities. We further discuss theoretical developments in the sociology of sexuality to provide background to the concepts and measures both bodies of research employ in practice. We argue that future research should integrate these approaches to consider how local and diffuse cultural understandings of sexual orientation shape the valuation of workers.     

State and local government wage differentials: An intrastate analysis

Previous estimates of state and local government wage differentials have been typically based on data aggregated across all states, and such aggregation may produce seriously misleading differential estimates. We estimate intrastate earnings differentials for the state and local sectors in Wisconsin, four other midwestern states, and two states outside the midwest. There is substantial variation in the differentials: aggregated differentials can be misleading. Our work also confirms that state and local government labor markets have reduced earnings dispersion and investigates the possibility that higher public sector earnings may attract an “over-qualified” work force. The authors thank the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute for financial support and members of the UWM economics seminar and Sammis White for detailed comments on earlier drafts.