This paper examines the role of persistent effects of past labor market conditions in explaining trends in the college-high school wage gap in the US. I document increases in the wage gap for older workers since the late 1990s, which are larger than those predicted by standard explanations and are consistent with an important role for persistence in the wage gap. Using a semi-parametric estimat...

Between 1979 and 2007 a strong positive monotonic relationship between wage inequality and city size has developed. This paper investigates the links between this emergent city size inequality premium and the contemporaneous nationwide increase in wage inequality. After controlling for the skill composition of the workforce across cities of different sizes, we show that at least 23 percent of t...

This paper attempts to explain the increase in inequality that has been observed in all transition economies by constructing a simple model of change in composition of employment during the transition. The change consists of the ‘hollowing-out’ of the state-sector middle class as it moves into either the ‘rich’ private sector or the ‘poor’ unemployed sector. The predictions of the model are con...

Wage inequality between education groups in the United States has increased substantially since the early 1980s. The relative number of college-educated workers has also increased dramatically in the postwar period. This paper presents a unified framework where the dynamics of both skill accumulation and wage inequality arise as an equilibrium outcome driven by measured investmentspecific techn...

Title of Dissertation: Essays on Inequality and Reforms: Evidence from India Utsav Kumar, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Directed By: Assistant Professor Nuno Limão, Department of Economics Economic reforms along with its promise of increasing income and growth rates have also raised concerns about its distributional implications. These concerns are at the heart of the arguments of those who oppose...

After two decades of rising wage inequality, it is important to examine the impact of these changes on lifetime wage growth. This paper compares the intragenerational mobility of two NLS cohorts of young white men: the first entered the labor market in the late 1960s, the second in the early 1980s. For each cohort, we analyze wage profiles across 16 years using a mixed-effects model. We find th...

Changes in Wage Structure in Urban India 1983-2004: A Quantile Regression Decomposition This paper examines changes in the wage structure in urban India during the past two decades (1983-2004) across the entire wage distribution using the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition approach. Real wages increased throughout the wage distribution during 1983-1993; however, it increased only in the uppe...

uring the 1980s, the gap between the earnings of low-skilled and high-skilled workers grew substantially in the United States. Researchers have advanced a number of arguments to explain the increasing disparity. This article uses descriptive and statistical evidence to evaluate two of the most prominent arguments: increased competition from low-wage developing countries—the “trade” argument—and...

This paper investigates the patterns of within establishment wage inequality in four European countries (Belgium, Ireland, Italy and Spain). Using matched employeremployee data (ESES) we analyse the effects of work organization practices, pay policies, bargaining procedures and industrial relations arrangements on the pattern of wage differentials in the firm. The main findings suggest that bot...