Studies in Labor Economics

该项目考察了劳动经济学中的两个重要主题。第一个问题涉及如何确定每年的工作时间，特别强调基本上没有研究过的带薪和无薪休假问题。这项研究的目的之一是对工作假进行全面的实证分析。收入动态小组研究、健康和退休调查和其他来源被用来提供一组关于带薪休假周数和总休假周数如何随工资率、小时限制指标、每周工作时间、劳动力市场经验、工作资历、工会状况、监管状况、公司规模、种族、性别、职业和行业特征而变化的基本事实。这项研究衡量了员工换工作时带薪假期会发生什么，并确定了休假在多大程度上是公司广泛政策的硬性功能，还是员工个人可以讨价还价的程度。该项目更广泛的目标是提高对人们在多大程度上可以在更高的薪酬和更短的工作时间之间做出选择的理解，以及它们之间的权衡条件。这一分析将为有关如何修改劳动力市场以更好地适应寻求平衡职业目标和家庭义务的男性和女性的政策讨论提供信息。该项目的第二部分考察了名义工资刚性下降对劳动经济学中一系列广泛问题的影响。有相当多的证据表明，公司非常不愿意削减名义工资率，但很少有研究表明，削减工资的障碍如何影响公司的人事决定。这项研究的核心是开发和估计一个模型，当现有工人的名义减薪成本太高而无法实施时，一个理性、前瞻性的公司的招聘、工资设定和裁员行为的模型。在选择填补空缺的工资和制定后续工资时，这样的公司必须考虑到这样一个事实，即今天选择的名义工资为工人未来的工资设定了一个下限。在当前和未来生产率存在不确定性的情况下，支付更高的工资来增加招聘和留住员工的成本，会增加不得不在随后的一段时间内向工人支付过高工资或招致裁员成本的风险。该模型被估计并用于重新审视劳动经济学中的一些重要主题，在这些主题中，名义工资刚性的后果在以前的研究中被忽略了。这些研究包括对收入随着劳动力市场经验和工作资历的增长程度的研究，对工作内部和跨工作的工资动态的研究，最近关于雇主学习和工资动态的研究，对基于种族、民族或性别的统计歧视的研究，以及关于通货膨胀对收入分配影响的研究。这项研究使用了收入动态小组研究的数据。

The project examines two important topics in labor economics. The first concerns how annual hours of work are determined, with a special emphasis on the largely unresearched issue of paid and unpaid leave. One objective of the study is to provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of work leave. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Survey, and other sources are used to provide a basic set of facts about how paid weeks of leave and total weeks of leave vary with wage rates, indicators of hours constraints, weekly work hours, labor market experience, job seniority, union status, supervisory status, firm size, race, gender, and occupation and industry characteristics. The study measures what happens to paid leave when workers change jobs and determines the degree to which leave is a rigid function of firm wide policy or is something that individual employees can bargain over. The broader goal of the project is to improve understanding of the extent to which people can choose between higher compensation and shorter hours and the terms of the tradeoff between them. The analysis will inform policy discussions concerning how the labor market can be modified to better accommodate men and women who are seeking to balance career goals with family obligations. The second part of the project examines the implications of downward nominal wage rigidity for a broad set of questions in labor economics. There is considerable evidence suggesting that firms are very reluctant to cut nominal wage rates, but there is little research on how barriers to wage cuts influence the personnel decisions of firms. The heart of the study is the development and estimation of a model of the hiring, wage setting, and layoff behavior of a rational, forward looking firm when nominal wages cuts for incumbent workers are too costly to impose. When choosing a wage to fill a vacancy and when setting subsequent wages, such a firm must take account of the fact that the nominal wage chosen today sets a floor on a worker's future wages. In the presence of uncertainty about current and future productivity, paying higher wages to increase hiring rates and retention increases the risk of having to either overpay the worker in a subsequent period or incur the cost of a layoff. The model is estimated and used to revisit a number of important subjects in labor economics where the consequences of nominal wage rigidity have been ignored in previous research. These include studies of the degree to which earnings rise with labor market experience and job seniority, studies of wage dynamics within jobs and across jobs, recent research on employer learning and wage dynamics, studies of statistical discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex, and research on the effects of inflation on the distribution of earnings. The study uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.