The Economics of Comparable Worth

Killingsworth provides a clear statement of the definitional and conceptual issues surrounding comparable worth as well as an examination of its actual and potential effects. He also shows how comparable worth might work in alternative labor market settings and provides evidence of the effects of the comparable worth measures implemented in San Jose, Calif., the State of Minnesota, and Australia.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1100/thumbnail.jp

1989 as a mimetic revolution: Russia and the challenge of post-communism

Various terms have been used to describe the momentous events of 1989, including Jürgen Habermas’s ‘rectifying revolution,’ and my own notion of 1989 as a type of ‘anti-revolution’: repudiating not only what had come before, but also denying the political logic of communist power, as well as the emancipatory potential of revolutionary socialism in its entirety. In the event, while the negative agenda of 1989 has been fulfilled, it failed in the end to transcend the political logic of the systems that collapsed at that time. This paper explores the unfulfilled potential of 1989. Finally, 1989 became more of a counter- rather than an anti-revolution, replicating in an inverted form the practices of the mature state socialist regimes. The paucity of institutional and intellectual innovation arising from 1989 is striking. The dominant motif was ‘returnism,’ the attempt to join an established enterprise rather than transforming it. Thus, 1989 can be seen as mimetic revolution, in the sense that it emulated systems that were not organically developed in the societies in which they were implanted. For Eastern Europe ‘returning’ to Europe appeared natural, but for Russia the civilizational challenge of post-communism was of an entirely different order. There could be no return, and instead of a linear transition outlined by the classic transitological literature, Russia’s post-communism demonstrated that the history of others could not be mechanically transplanted from one society to another

Must a Negative Income Tax Reduce Labor Supply?: A Study of the Family's Allocation of Time

Models of the labor supply behavior of single persons predict that a negative income tax (NIT) will always reduce the labor supply and earnings of such persons. I consider three models of family labor supply; and find that in all three, a NIT might raise a given family member's labor supply and might also raise total family labor supply: in one, a NIT could even raise total family earnings. These models and recent empirical estimates (showing positive NIT effects on some family members¿ labor amply and on some families¿ earnings) suggest that the work disincentive effects and the cost of a NIT may be less than has previously been thought

Wage Data and Estimation of the Labor Supply Function

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in both opportunities for and challenges associated with estimation of labor supply f,mactions. lch more is available in the way of data -- from the Survey of Economic Opportuity, the National Longitudinal Survey the Census exp_erimental data collected during negative income tax experiments etc. -- and this has made possible research of a remarkSsly sophisticated nature. But along with this sophistication has come a growing awareness among students of !gor supply that available wage data are seriously deficient in at least two ways: 1-/ (i) The wages of employed ersons have only rarely been measured directly. Rather the wages of such persons must in eneral be measured indirectly, e.g. by dividing total earnings by total hours of work. Moreover, even when wa6es have been measured directly, such measures may well be subject to serious erro

Human Capital and the Life-Cycle

In what follows I develop a life-cycle model of labor supply and human capital accumulation. The model assumes that the individual maximizes lifetime utility by allocating time to work, leisure and human capital formation; and the model allows for two different kinds of human capital -- "training" and "experience" (i.e., "learning by doing"). The model thus effects a synthesis of diverging viewpoints in the analysis of labor supply in two important respects. First; it offers a unified treatment of the relationship between wage rates, hours of work and investment in human capital; and second, it provides a comprehensive treatment of the nature and significance of "human capital" itself

Introduction [to The Economics of Comparable Worth]

Killingsworth provides a clear statement of the definitional and conceptual issues surrounding comparable worth as well as an examination of its actual and potential effects. He also shows how comparable worth might work in alternative labor market settings and provides evidence of the effects of the comparable worth measures implemented in San Jose, Calif., the State of Minnesota, and Australia.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1100/thumbnail.jp

The Economics of Comparable Worth

Killingsworth provides a clear statement of the definitional and conceptual issues surrounding comparable worth as well as an examination of its actual and potential effects. He also shows how comparable worth might work in alternative labor market settings and provides evidence of the effects of the comparable worth measures implemented in San Jose, Calif., the State of Minnesota, and Australia.comparable worth, wage differentials