Computing Inequality: Have Computers Changed the Labor Market?

Technical Change , Inequality , and The Labor Market ∗

This essay discusses the effect of technical change on wage inequality. I argue that the behavior of wages and returns to schooling indicates that technical change has been skill-biased during the past sixty years. Furthermore, the recent increase in inequality is most likely due to an acceleration in skill bias. In contrast to twentiethcentury developments, much of thr technical change during ...

Globalization, Inequality and Labor Market Policies

This paper addresses four questions. First, is globalization associated with more inequality in consumption or earnings? Second, is the labor market an important transmission mechanism? Third, can labor market policies reduce inequality? And fourth, would these policies have important side effects on efficiency? The answers are based on an analytical survey of the literature, including several ...

Wage Inequality in a Frictional Labor Market

Wage inequality in the United States has grown substantially in the past two decades. Standard supply-demand analysis in the empirics of inequality (e.g. Katz and Murphy (1992)) indicates that we may attribute some of this trend to an outward shift in the demand for high skilled labor. In this paper we examine a simple static channel in which the wage premium for skill may grow increased firm e...

Immigration, Labor Market and Wage Inequality

Explaining Ethnic Inequality in the German Labor Market: Labor Market Institutions, Context of Reception, and Boundaries

The descendants of immigrants comprise nearly a third of the West German population under the age of 25 years and will soon become a substantial proportion of the native born labor force. Owing to the young age of this group, and a lack of governmental data on parental place of birth, there is currently little research that compares the labor market outcomes of the second generation of differen...