Preface

Abstract

Understanding how worker well-being is distributed across the population is of paramount importance. With such knowledge policy makers can devise efficient strategies to improve social welfare. This volume contains 13 chapters on topics enhancing our comprehension of inequality across workers. The issues addressed deal directly with the economic institutions that affect individual and family earnings distributions. The themes explored include job training, worker and firm mobility, minimum wages, wage arrears, unions, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, and schooling. Among the questions answered are: To what extent do greater work hours of women mitigate the widening family earnings distribution? To what extent does deunionization widen the distribution of earnings? Do computers really cause a widening of the earnings distribution? How would the Russian wage distribution change if one accounted for wage arrears? How much of job creation and job destruction comes about because of business relocation? To what extent does maternal education increase children's education? Why do increases in the minimum wage fail to substantially decrease employment as economic theory would predict? And, to what extent do job skills matter for low-income workers?

Citation

Polachek, S.W. and Bargain, O. (2007), "Preface", Polachek, S.W. and Bargain, O. (Ed.) Aspects of Worker Well-Being (Research in Labor Economics, Vol. 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. vii-xii. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0147-9121(06)26015-1