Worker Well-being

Fourteen papers address issues relevant to worker well-being. Papers discuss technology, unemployment, and inflation; the incidence of overschooling and underschooling and its effect on earnings in the United States and Hong Kong; whether higher returns to college education encourage college enrollments; whether compulsory school attendance laws alone explain the association between quarter of birth and earnings; motivation and labor market outcomes; career hierarchy in dual-earner families; whether gender matters for job mobility in 1990s Britain; how to measure relative quality of life from a cross-migration regression and an application to Canadian Provinces; employer -provided pension data in the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women and in the Health and Retirement Study; a test of E. Lazear's mandatory retirement model; the effectiveness of public works programs in Eastern Germany as measured by their effects on individual future reemployment probabilities in regular jobs; lessons about the labor supply implications of universal health coverage from a study of individuals receiving insurance through their spouses' employers; dimensions of the wage-unemployment relationship in the Nordic countries; and the extent and consequences of downward nominal wage rigidity. Polachek is in the Department of Economics at the State University of New York, Binghamton. No index.