Occupations have long been regarded as central to the stratification systems of industrial countries, but have played little role in empirical attempts to explain the well-documented increases in wage inequality that occurred in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. We address this deficiency by assessing occupation-level effects on wage inequality using data from the Current Population Sur...

This paper investigates the local labor supply effects of changes to the minimum wage by examining the response of low-skilled immigrants' location decisions. Canonical models emphasize the importance of labor mobility when evaluating the employment effects of the minimum wage; yet few studies address this outcome directly. Low-skilled immigrant populations shift toward labor markets with stagn...

one of the main goals of government is to increase economic growth and public welfare. therefore, the recognition of useful factors that facilitate achievement of this goal has critical role in economic literature. this study focuses on the effect of gender inequality on the reduction of economic growth and investigate whether gender inequality have significant effect on economic development an...

This paper provides a theory of wage inequality that hinges on entrepreneurship. The theory is motivated by new empirical findings. Among them, I document that in countries where barriers to entrepreneurship are high, wage inequality is low. As noted in the literature, differences in wage inequality across countries are, to a great extent, determined by differences in the skill premium, defined...

Recent widening of the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers has been attributed mainly to skill-biased-technical-change and to trade liberalization. This paper examines the effects of the two in a unified model, in which trade and technology adoption are endogenous. The paper has two main results. First, technical progress increases the wage gap in developed and in less developed coun...

I argue that increased foreign competition can affect technical choice and skill differentials even when actual imports do not rise significantly. I present a model of General Oligopolistic Equilibrium ("GOLE") in which a reduction in import barriers (whether technological or policy-imposed) encourages more strategic investment by incumbent firms. The predictions accord with many of the stylise...

Angle (2006) shows that the macro model of the Inequality Process provides a parsimonious fit to the U.S. wage income distribution conditioned on education, 1961-2001. Such a model should also account for all time-series of scalar statistics of annual wage income. The present paper examines one such time-series, the relative frequency of large wage incomes 1961-2003. Figure 1 shows an aspect of...

This paper uses matched employee-employer data from the UK that we augment with information on R&D expenditures, to analyze the relationship between innovativeness and average wage income across firms. We first show that more R&D intensive firms pay higher wages on average. Our second finding is that the premium to working in more R&D intensive firms seems to be higher for low-skilled workers t...

There is little disagreement among most economists that countries benefit from trade liberalization. Yet, whether unilateral, multilateral (through the World Trade Organization) or through regional integration agreements (RIAs), trade liberalization has been one of the most controversial economic issues of our time. It is the focus of everyone from politicians to union leaders and anti-globaliz...