Wages and Prices

Macroeconomic Stability: The Role of Wages and Prices

OASDHI Benefits, Prices, and Wages: Effect of 1967 Benefit Increase

IN MARCH 1968, approximately 24 million Americans were receiving monthly cash benefits under the old-age, survivors, disability, and health insurance (OASDHI) program. Their monthly benefits were 13 percent or more higher than those paid to beneficiaries through January 1968, with the gains resulting from the across-the-board increase provided by t,he 1967 amendments to the Social Security Act....

Earnings Functions When Wages and Prices Vary by Location

Economists generally assume, implicitly, that “the return to schooling” is invariant across local labor markets. We demonstrate that this outcome pertains if and only if preferences are homothetic—a special case that seems unlikely. Our theory predicts that returns to education will instead be relatively low in expensive high-amenity locations. Our analysis of U.S. data provides support for thi...

Relaxing Occupational Licensing Requirements: Analyzing Wages and Prices for a Medical Service*

Occupational licensing laws have been relaxed in a large number of US states to give nurse practitioners the ability to perform more tasks without the supervision of medical doctors. We investigate how these regulations affect wages, hours worked, and the prevailing transaction prices and quality levels associated with certain types of medical services. We find that when nurse practitioners hav...

Prices , Wages and the U . S . NAIRU in the 1990 s

Using quarterly macro data and annual state panel data, we examine various explanations of the low rate of price inflation, strong real wage growth, and low rate of unemployment in the U.S. economy during the late 1990s. Many of these explanations imply shifts in the coefficients of price and wage Phillips curves. We find, however, that once one accounts for the univariate trends in the unemplo...