As women's labor-force participation and earnings have grown, so has the likelihood that wives outearn their husbands. A common concern is that these couples may be at heightened risk of divorce. Yet with the rise of egalitarian marriage, wives' relative earnings may be more weakly associated with divorce than in the past. We examine trends in the association between wives' relative earnings an...

The Social Security Administration (SSA) receives reports of earnings for the U.S. working population each year. Earnings data are used to administer the Social Security programs and to conduct research on the populations served by those programs. The administrative needs of SSA and other agencies have changed over time and, as a result, there have been numerous changes to the main source of SS...

We analyze the changes in earnings of paid workers (wage earners) in rural India from 2004/05 to 2011/12. Real earnings increased at all percentiles, and the percentage increase was larger at the lower end. Consequently, earnings inequality declined. Recentered influence function decompositions show that throughout the earnings distribution, except at the very top, both changes in “worker chara...

Recent studies find that stocks with higher dispersion of analysts’ earnings forecasts have lower future returns. The phenomenon is popularly interpreted as evidence that stock prices reflect optimism in the presence of differences of opinions and short-sales constraints. This paper shows that there is also a negative relationship between forecast dispersion and a firm’s unexpected future earni...

The backlash avoidance model (BAM) suggests women insufficiently self-promote because they fear backlash for behavior which is incongruent with traditional gender roles. Avoiding self-promoting behavior is also potentially related to associating success with negative consequences. In two studies we tested whether self-promotion and fear of success will be predictors of lower salaries and antici...

A Sample and Variable De…nitions This appendix expands on Section II.B to provide more detailed information on the construction of our analysis samples. As described in the text, we express all monetary variables in 2010 dollars, adjusting for in ‡ation using the o¢ cial IRS in ‡ation parameters used to index the tax system. Variable De…nitions for Tax Filers. We use two earnings concepts in ou...

We use linked administrative data from program and earnings records to summarize the 2007 employment rates of Social Security disability program beneficiaries at the national and state levels, as well as changes in employment since 1996. The findings provide new information on the employment activities of beneficiaries that should be useful in assessing current agency policies and providing ben...

Managers use real earnings management (REM) to influence reported earnings through the manipulation of real business activities. Extant literature generally employs crosssectional analysis to identify REM, but newer studies suggest that these traditional REM measures are severely mis-specified. In this study, we employ a new methodology that utilizes firm-specific time-series characteristics of...

We study frictions in adjusting earnings to changes in the Social Security Annual Earnings Test (AET) using a panel of Social Security Administration microdata on one percent of the U.S. population from 1961 to 2006. Individuals continue to "bunch" at the convex kink the AET creates even when they are no longer subject to the AET, consistent with the existence of earnings adjustment frictions i...

Using a large longitudinal data set, we study the effects of increased trade on earnings and mobility in the Swedish labor market in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Earnings respond significantly to changes in industry sales, whether generated by domestic market forces or international trade: Swedish exports (imports) raise (lower) annual earnings, but changes in trade affect earnings just as a...