In a classic paper, Schelling (1971) showed that extreme segregation can arise from
social interactions in preferences: once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a
"tipping point", all the whites leave. We use regression discontinuity methods and
Census tract data from the past four decades to test for the presence of discrete nonlinearities
in the dynamics of neighborhood racial composition. White mobility patterns
in most cities exhibit tipping-like behavior, with a range of tipping points centered
around a 13% minority share. These patterns are very pronounced during the 1970s
and 1980s, and diminish but do not disappear in the 1990s. We find similar dynamic
patterns in neighborhoods and in schools. A variety of specification checks rule out the
possibility that the discontinuity in the initial minority share is driven by income
stratification or other factors, and underscore the importance of white preferences over
neighbors ' race and ethnicity in the dynamic process of segregation. Finally, we relate
the location of the estimated tipping points in different cities to measures of the racial
attitudes of whites, and find that cities with more racially tolerant whites have higher
tipping points.

According to standard economic models, adverse demand shocks will lead to bigger
employment losses if institutional factors like minimum wages and trade unions prevent real
wages from falling. Some economists have argued that this insight explains the contrast
between the United States, where real wages fell over the 1980s and aggregate employment
expanded vigorously, and Europe, where real wages held steady and employment was
stagnant. We test the hypothesis by comparing recent changes in wages and employment
rates for different age and education groups in the United States, Canada, and France. We
argue that the same forces that led to falling real wages for less-skilled workers in the U.S.
also affected Canada and France. Consistent with the view that labor market institutions in
Canada and France reduce wage flexibility, we find that the relative wages of less-skilled
workers fell more slowly in Canada than the U.S. during the 1980s, and did not fall at all in
France. Contrary to expectations, however, we find little evidence that wage inflexibilities
generated divergent patterns of relative employment growth across the three countries.

In The Wage Qurve, David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald argue that there is
a fundamental negative relation between wages and the unemployment rate in a worker’s local
labor market. Blanchflower and Oswald use large-scale micro data sets to estimate this relation
for the United States, Britain, and 10 other countries. I review their empirical methods and
findings, and provide some further evidence on the nature of the wage curve relationship in the
United States. I conclude that there is a strong statistical correlation between rates of pay and
local unemployment, although the interpretation of this correlation remains unresolved.

During the 1980s wage differentials between younger and older
workers and between more and less educated workers expanded
rapidly. Wage dispersion among individuals with the same age
and education also rose. A simple explanation for both sets of
facts is that earnings represent a return to a one-dimensional
index of skill, and that the rate of return to skill rose over
the decade.
We explore a simple method for estimating and testing ‘single
index’ models of wages. Our approach integrates 3 dimensions
of skill: age, education, and unobserved ability. We find that
a one-dimensional skill model gives a relatively successful
account of changes in the structure of wages for white men and
women between 1979 and 1989. We then use the estimated models
for whites to analyze recent changes in the relative wages of
black men and women.

This paper reviews and interprets the literature on the effect of
school resources on students‘ eventual earnings and educational
attainment. In addition, new evidence is presented on the impact
of the great disparity in school resources between black and white
students in North and South Carolina that existed in the first half
of the 20th century, and the subsequent narrowing of these resource
disparities. Following birth cohorts over time, gaps in earnings
and educational attainment for blacks and whites in the Carolinas
tend to mirror the gaps in school resources.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the impact of the Mariel
Boatlift on the Miami labor market, focusing on the effects on wages and
unemployment rates of less-skilled workers. The Mariel immigrants
increased the population and labor force of the Miami metropolitan area by
6-7 percent. Most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled: as a
result, the proportional increase in labor supply to less-skilled
occupations and industries was probably much greater. Nevertheless, an
analysis of wages of non-Cuban workers in Miami over the 1979-85 period
reveals virtually no effect of the Mariel influx. Likewise, there is no
indication that the Boatlift lead to an increase in the unemployment rates
of less-skilled blacks or other non-Cuban workers. Even among the Cuban
population wages and unemployment rates of earlier immigrants were not
substantially effected by the arrival of the Mariels.

Although economists acknowledge that various indicators of educational attainment (e.g., highest
grade completed, credentials earned) might serve as signals of a worker’s productivity, the practical
importance of education-based signaling is not clear. In this paper we estimate the signaling value
of a high school diploma, the most commonly held credential in the U.S. To do so, we compare the
earnings of workers that barely passed and barely failed high school exit exams, standardized tests
that, in some states, students must pass to earn a high school diploma. Since these groups should, on
average, look the same to firms (the only difference being that "barely passers" have a diploma while
"barely failers" do not), this earnings comparison should identify the signaling value of the diploma.
Using linked administrative data on earnings and education from two states that use high school exit
exams (Florida and Texas), we estimate that a diploma has little effect on earnings. For both states, we
can reject that individuals with a diploma earn eight percent more than otherwise-identical individuals
without one; combining the state-specific estimates, we can reject signaling values larger than five or six
percent. While these confidence intervals include economically important signaling values, they exclude
both the raw earnings difference between workers with and without a diploma and the regression-adjusted
estimates reported in the previous literature.

This paper re-examines the effect of the 1992 New Jersey minimum wage increase on
employment in the fast-food industry. We begin by analyzing employment trends using a
comprehensive new data set derived from the Bureau of Labor Statistics's (BLS's) ES-202 data
file. Both a longitudinal sample and a repeated-cross-section sample drawn from these data
indicate similar or slightly faster employment growth in New Jersey than in eastern Pennsylvania
after the rise in New Jersey's minimum wage, consistent with the main findings of our earlier
survey. We also use the ES-202 data to measure the effects of the 1996 increase in the federal
minimum wage, which raised the minimum wage in Pennsylvania but not in New Jersey. We
find no indication of relative employment losses in Pennsylvania. In light of these findings, we
re-examine employment trends in the sample of fast-food restaurants assembled by the
Employment Policies Institute (EPI) and David Neumark and William Wascher. The differences
between this sample and both the BLS data and our earlier sample are attributable to a small set
of restaurants owned by a single franchisee who provided the original Pennsylvania data for a
1995 EPI study. We also find that employment trends in the EPI/Neumark-Wascher sample are
strikingly different for firms that reported their data on a weekly, biweekly or monthly basis,
possibly because of seasonal factors. Controlling for the systematic effects of the varying
reporting intervals, the combined EPI/Neumark-Wascher sample shows no difference in hours
growth between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

This paper presents evidence on two aspects of strike activity
associated with the renegotiation of union contracts: the effects of
contract characteristics on dispute probabilities; and the variation in
strike activity over tine within bargaining pairs. Cross-sectional and
longitudinal estimation techniques show that strike probabilities are
higher in summer and fall than winter and spring. Strike probabilities
are also increased by increasing the length of time between negotiations, and reduced in limited wage reopening negotiations. Finally,
strike probabilities are significantly affected by lagged strike out-
comes. Relative to a peaceful settlement of the previous contract,
strike probabilities are l0 percentage points higher following a strike
of two weeks or less, and 5 to 7 percentage points lower following a
strike of longer than two weeks.

This paper examines the effects of immigration on the labor market
outcomes of less-skilled natives. Working from a simple model of a local
labor market, we show that the effects of immigration can be estimated from
the correlations between the fraction of immigrants in a city and the
employment and wage outcomes of natives. The size of the effects depend on
the fraction and skill composition of the immigrants. We go on the compute
these correlations using city-specific outcomes for individuals in 120
major SMSA's in the 1970 and 1980 Censuses. We also use the relative
industry distributions of immigrants and natives to provide a direct
assessment of the degree of labor market competition between them.
Our empirical findings indicate a modest degree of competition between
immigrants and less-skilled natives. A comparison of industry
distributions shows that an increase in the fraction of immigrants in the
labor force translates to an approximately equivalent percentage increase
in the supply of labor to industries in which less-skilled natives are
employed. Based on this calculation, immigrant inflows between 1970 and
1980 generated l-2 percent increases in labor supply to these industries in
most cities. A comparison of industry distributions of less-skilled
natives in high- and low-immigrant share cities between 1970 and 1980 shows
some displacement out of low-wage immigrant-intensive industries.
We find little effect of immigration on the employment outcomes of
the four race/sex groups that we consider. Our estimates of the effect of
immigration on the wages of less-skilled natives are sensitive to the
specification and estimation procedure. However, our preferred estimates,
which are based on first differences between 1980 and 1970 and the use of
instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of immigrant inflows,
imply that an increase in immigrants equal to l percent of an SMSA's
population reduces native wages by roughly 1.2 percent.