Hint: They Involve food.

New research finds that when U.S. companies switched away from standardized pay rates for blue-collar jobs in the late 1970s and 1980s, workers’ real wages declined.

In a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Clem Aeppli and MIT Sloan Associate Professor Nathan Wilmers find that a plateau in U.S. earnings inequality that started around 2012 was primarily due to rapid wage gains by workers at the low end of the labor market,

Invited guests attended a special event at the new MIT Museum location in Kendall Square in early December.

Zach Tan, a first-year doctoral student in the Economic Sociology research group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has won the 2024 Rafel Lucea Memorial Research Award.

What happens to company profits, wages, and consumer prices when union membership becomes more affordable for employees? That’s a question posed in an interesting working paper by Samuel Dodini, MIT Sloan Professor Anna Stansbury, and Alexander Willén.

The Fall 2022 edition of the newsletter of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER) is now available online.

Read the Spring 2023 newsletter of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research

A new Bloomberg article features MIT Sloan’s “People and Profits” class, an innovative course both developed and currently taught by IWER faculty members.