Wages, work and the market for human time.
10 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture
International Labour Organization · 2018
Estimates that roughly six in ten of the world's employed work informally, and shows informality is the main form of employment across most of the…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Two Faces of Unionism
Richard B. Freeman & James L. Medoff · 1979
Distinguishes a union's monopoly face, which raises wages above the competitive level, from its voice face, which lets workers negotiate over…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Investment in Human Capital
Theodore W. Schultz · 1961
Argues that education and health are investments that raise a worker's productive capacity, so labour is not a homogeneous input and much of the…
+5 more at this level
11 works
International Labour Organization
Estimates that roughly six in ten of the world's employed work informally, and shows informality is the main form of employment across most of the world rather than a marginal or transitional state.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard B. Freeman & James L. Medoff
Distinguishes a union's monopoly face, which raises wages above the competitive level, from its voice face, which lets workers negotiate over conditions instead of quitting, and argues the voice effect is systematically underrated.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David Card & Alan B. Krueger
A minimum-wage increase in New Jersey was not followed by the fall in fast-food employment that standard competitive theory predicted relative to neighbouring Pennsylvania — a result that reopened a debate textbooks had treated as settled.
22 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Marianne Bertrand & Sendhil Mullainathan
Sends nearly identical resumes differing only in the applicant's apparently Black or white name, and finds white-sounding names receive far more callbacks, isolating discrimination from the qualifications the resumes otherwise share.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lawrence F. Katz & Alan B. Krueger
Finds a sharp rise in US workers in temporary, contract and gig arrangements between 2005 and 2015, using a survey designed to catch work the standard employment statistics were missing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Theodore W. Schultz
Argues that education and health are investments that raise a worker's productive capacity, so labour is not a homogeneous input and much of the unexplained growth in output is accumulated human capital.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jacob Mincer
Models a married woman's decision to work as a trade-off against the value of time spent at home, and finds her labour supply responds more strongly to wages than a man's does.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George A. Akerlof & Janet L. Yellen
Argues firms pay more than the market-clearing wage because workers who feel underpaid relative to a fair reference wage withhold effort, which can leave involuntary unemployment as an equilibrium outcome.
Christopher A. Pissarides
Models unemployment as the unavoidable by-product of the time it takes workers and firms to find each other, rather than as a simple excess of labour supply over demand.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David H. Autor, David Dorn & Gordon H. Hanson
Local labour markets most exposed to the surge of Chinese imports after 2001 saw larger, more persistent falls in employment and wages than trade theory's usual assumption of smooth national reallocation predicts.
48 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Daron Acemoglu & Pascual Restrepo
Finds that each industrial robot added per thousand workers in a US region reduced employment and wages there measurably, with no offsetting job gains found elsewhere in the same local labour market.
link checked 17 Sept 2026