NBER Working Papers by Maury Gittleman

Recent estimates in standard models of wage determination for both unionization and occupational licensing have shown wage effects that are similar across the two institutions. These cross-sectional estimates use specialized data sets, with small sample sizes, for the period 2006 through 2008. Our analysis examines the impact of unions and licensing coverage on wage determination using new data collected on licensing statutes that are then linked to longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) from 1979 to 2010. We develop several approaches, using both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, to measure the impact of these two labor market institutions on wage determination. Our estimates of the economic returns to union coverage are greater than those for...

Using data from both the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we found that on average over the period from 1984 to 2007, about one fifth of American households at a given point of time received a wealth transfer and these accounted for about a quarter of their net worth. Over the lifetime, about 30 percent of households could expect to receive a wealth transfer and these would account for close to 40 percent of their net worth near time of death. However, there is little evidence of an inheritance “boom.” In fact, from 1989 to 2007, the share of households in the SCF reporting a wealth transfer fell by 2.5 percentage points. The average value of inheritances received among all households did increase but at a slow pace, by 10 percent, but wealth...

The age structure of capital plays an important role in the measurement of productivity. It has been argued that the slowdown in the 1970's can be ascribed to the aging of the stock of capital. In this paper we incorporate the age structure in productivity measurement. A proposition proves that Nelson's (1964) formula is wrong. Our final proposition shows that inclusion of the vintage effect prompts an upward correction of measured productivity growth in times of an aging stock of capital. Here capital ages if the investment/capital ratio falls short of the inverse of the capital age, as a first proposition shows. The analysis rests on a rigorous accounting for vintages. We translate the Bureau of Economic Analysis' age of capital data into a measure of rates of obsolescence. Empiric...