William T. Alpert

Unions and private wage supplements

Private wage supplements are an important part of total compensation. A model of workers’ supplement expenditures is developed which shows that, although the expenditure determinants sometimes differ between broad industry/occupation subsamples, earnings, price effects of preferential tax treatment and economies of group purchase, unionization, the product market power of the firm, and worker age are usually significant determinants of supplement expenditures. The firm’s goal of reducing turnover costs as well as demographic, locational, and industry variables also systematically affect supplement expenditures. Supplements usually increase progressively with wages, indicating that often made proportionality assumptions are invalid.

Pregnancy and Parental Leave Benefits in the United States and Canada: Judicial Decisions and Legislation

This paper outlines the major judicial decisions and legislative initiatives that have shaped the growth of various types of maternity and parental leave employment benefits in the United States and Canada and analyzes the differences and similarities in the United States and Canadian evolution of these benefits. It presents the major judicial arguments in detail, because these arguments represent social and economic perspectives that shaped the labor market opportunities afforded women in the United States and Canada throughout the beginning and the middle of this century. It also highlights the interaction between judicial decisions and legislative initiatives in influencing the availability of leave.

Employment, unemployment and the minimum wage: a causality model

Some empirical work concerning the minimum wage tends to confirm the negative impacts of the law on employment, but much of that work leaves the existence and size of the fiats effects uncertain. Furthermore, many of the theoretical and statistical advances of the past 1½ decades have yet to be incorporated into the analysis of the laws effects. We apply time series and causality testing analysis developed from the transfer function to the minimum wage, employment unemployment series. We find some evidence that the minimum wage has lowered the employment of white male teenagers (age 16–19) and nonwhite males over the age of 20. However, these impacts are small. No other significant employment impacts are discovered and no significant unemployment impacts are found. Additional study of the laws impacts using advanced statistical methods is required.

The Effect of Class Attendance and Lecture Notes on Learning Outcomes

At many large universities it is conventional to deliver undergraduate introductory economics courses in a large lecture hall. However, not surprisingly, casual empiricism suggests that rates of student absenteeism are significantly greater in a large lecture format than in a smaller classroom setting. A compounding factor is that numerous empirical studies have established a significant negative relation between absenteeism and student performance. This study investigates the relation between absenteeism, the use of instructor provided online lecture notes, and student performance. The findings are that on average instructor lecture notes are not a substitute for class attendance. However, for some learning styles they can be a substitute, but for most learning styles they are not.