Preface / Solomon W. Polachek -- Intergenerational labor market and welfare consequences of poor health / Thomas J. Kniesner, Anthony T. LoSasso -- Early test scores, school quality and SES : longrun effects on wage and employment outcomes / Janet Currie, Duncan Thomas -- College quality and the distribution of earnings / Eric R. Eide, Mark H. Showalter -- Worker training in a restructuring economy : evidence from the Russian transition / Mark C. Berger, John S. Earle, Klara Z. Sabirianova -- A comparison of the human capital and signaling models : the case of the self-employed and the increase in the schooling premium in the 1980s / Magnus Lofstrom -- Do returns to human capital equalize across occupational paths? / James A. Freeman, Barry T. Hirsch -- Has compensation become more flexible? / Sandra A. Cannon, Bruce Fallick, Michael Lettau, Raven Saks -- Skill-biased technical change and trends in employer size effects / Todd Idson -- Employment of women and demand-side forces / Donna K. Ginther, Chinhui Juhn -- Revisiting women's preferences about future labor force attachment : what effects do they have on earnings and what are they affected by? / Bisakha Sen -- Getting ahead : the determinants of and payoffs to internal promotion for young U.S. men and women / Deborah A. Cobb-Clark -- The effect of health on employment transitions of older men / David M. Blau, Donna B. Gilleskie -- Looking again at instrumental variable estimation of wage models in the gender wage gap literature / Astrid Kunze -- Less-skilled workers, welfare reform, and the unemployment insurance system / Cynthia K. Gustafson Decker, Phillip B. Levine -- Abuse and work among poor women : evidence from Washington State / Mark W. Smith.

How do workers fare in a continually changing labor market? This volume contains fifteen original scientific papers each examining how socio-economic changes affect worker wellbeing. Among the findings are: most increases in female labor force participation occur among women with high husbands' earnings, dispelling the myth that shrinking husbands' relative earnings cause women's work activities to rise; increased globalization equalizes pay between but expands pay within corporate establishments; high quality colleges widen the earnings distribution for top earners but only negligibly affect earnings for low wage earners; mathematical success depends on school quality more so than verbal learning; and adult daughters who visit ailing parents daily in a nursing home decrease their annual labor supply by about 1,000 hours implying a welfare loss of 180,000 dollars. Findings are: physical and/or sexual abuse appear to afflict over 30 per cent of the population leading to a 15 per cent drop in employment probability and a 32 per cent loss in wages; and, training workers in an entirely new occupation raises an employee's wage growth while training workers in the same occupation decreases their wage growth, at least during the Russian economy's recent transition.

Print version record