The rise in wage inequality in the U.S. labor market during the 1980s is usually attributed to skill-biased technical change (SBTC), associated with the development of personal computers and related information technologies. We review the evidence in favor of this hypothesis, focusing on the implications of SBTC for economy-wide trends in wage inequality, and for the evolution of wage different...

Understanding Urban Wage Inequality in China 1988-2008: Evidence from Quantile Analysis This paper examines change in wage gaps in urban China by estimating quantile regressions on CHIPS data. It applies the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition, finding sharp increases in inequality from 1988 to 1995 and from 2002 to 2008 largely due to changes in the wage structure. The analysis reports how t...

Change in income inequality in Taiwan from 1964 to 1995 is sensitive to how household incomes are adjusted for household composition. The reasonable practice of dividing household income by persons (or adults) in the household eliminates the widely noted increase in income inequality from 1980 to 1995, and calls into question whether income inequality decreased substantially from 1964 to 1975. ...

The paper empirically explores the international linkages between gender inequality and trade flows of a sample of 92 developed and developing countries. The focus is on comparative advantage in labour-intensive manufactured goods. The results indicate that gender wage inequality is positively associated with comparative advantage in labourintensive goods, that is, countries with a larger gende...

I review the two most popular explanations for the differential trends in wage inequality in US/ UK and Europe: that relative supply of skills increased faster in Europe, and that European labour market institutions prevented inequality from increasing. Although these explanations go some way towards accounting for the differential cross-country inequality trends, it also appears that relative ...

Fears of rising income inequalities loom large in recent discussions of how globalization and in particular migration are affecting economies and societies [1]. This paper addresses the question how labor immigration is related to wage inequality by using a specific-factors trade model. We show that the impact of immigration of low or highly skilled labor on wage inequality depends mainly on th...

We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit in four sub-intervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a good approximation to the wage structure and can explain nearly all of the dramatic rise in West German w...

This paper compares trends in wage inequality in the U.S. and Germany using an approach developed by MaCurdy and Mroz (1995) to separate age, time, and cohort effects. Between 1979 and 2004, wage inequality increased strongly in both the U.S. and Germany but there were various country specific aspects of this increase. For the U.S., we find faster wage growth since the 1990s at the top (80% qua...

In a two sector extension of the Mortensen-Pissarides model of endogenous job destruction, it is shown that trade liberalization increases both job creation and job destruction in the import competing sector and reduces them in the export sector. Since trade liberalization increases unemployment in the import competing sector and reduces it in the export sector, the impact on economywide unempl...

We use a panel of more than 100 countries for the period 1980 to 2002 to analyse the relationship between inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and wage inequality. We particularly check whether this relationship is non-linear, in line with a theoretical discussion. We find that the effect of FDI differs according to the level of development: we depict two different patterns, one for OECD (dev...