Alessandro Barattieri, Susanto Basu, and Peter Gottschalk use data for the period 1996-1999 from the Survey of Income and Program Participation -- which provides information on wages, employment, and demographic characteristics for a large and representative sample of the U.S. population -- to analyze adjustments in nominal (that is, not adjusted for inflation) wages. They find wages to be very sticky: in an average 3-month period, the probability that an individual's nominal wage will change is between 5 and 18 percent. The frequency of wage adjustments does not display significant seasonal patterns, nor is there much difference across industries and occupations. However, the probability of a wage change is positively correlated with the unemployment rate and the consumer price inflation rate.

David Figlio and Deborah Fletcher document the degree to which aging in place -- older people staying in their homes -- has occurred in the American suburbs, and how that has influenced school finance in those communities. Matching data from the 1950 and 1960 Censuses of Population and Housing to more recent data, these researchers find that the share of elderly adults who stay in their homes is negatively related to the level of support for public schooling. This is especially the case in school districts in metropolitan areas where the school-aged children are more likely to be nonwhite than the elderly population.

Michael Haines uses data from the 1900 and 1910 Integrated Public Use Microsamples, published data from the Birth Registration Area in the 1920s, results from a number of surveys, and the Linked Birth & Infant Death Files from the National Center for Health Statistics for 1991, and finds that infant and child mortality is correlated with such variables as father or mother's occupation and education, family income, race, ethnicity, and residence. He also finds that although there have been large reductions in the level of infant and child mortality rates both within and across socioeconomic groups over the 20th century, relative inequality has not diminished.

If information and communication technologies (ICT) complement the analytical tasks primarily performed by highly educated workers and substitute for the routine tasks generally performed by middle educated workers -- but have little effect on low educated workers who perform manual non-routine tasks -- then ICT can explain the observed polarization in the labor market. Using industry-level data on the U.S., Japan, and nine European countries from 1980-2004, co-authors Guy Michaels, Ashwini Natraj, and John Van Reenen confirm that industries with faster growth of ICT saw greater increases in relative demand for high educated workers and larger declines in relative demand for middle educated workers. Technologies can account for up to one fourth of the growth in demand for the college educated in the quarter century since 1980, they conclude.

Cross-sectional analyses that Neeraj Kaushal and Robert Kaestner perform suggest that approximately three decades of residency in the United States is associated with a 9-to-11 percentage point (12-to-15 percent) decline in the probability of lacking health insurance for Mexican men and women. But analyses that instead use longitudinal data and fixed-effects methods show that time in the United States is unrelated to health insurance coverage. The researchers further find that in spite of growing access to insurance, self-reported health declines slightly with time in the United States.

Using partly confidential business survey data from the United States and Germany, Ruediger Bachmann, Steffen Elstner, and Eric Sims find that increased uncertainty about business can lead to prolonged declines in economic activity, but not to the “wait-and-see” effect – that is, large initial declines in economic activity with subsequent quick rebounds – discussed in the recent literature. Instead, increased uncertainty about business acts much like a decrease in confidence around business. The researchers argue that “high uncertainty events are a mere epiphenomenon of bad economic times: recessions breed uncertainty.