We develop semiparametric and instrumental-variables approaches to self-selection problems in comparisons of wage inequality between educational groups. We propose new estimators to identify the causal effect of college education on scale parameters of wage distributions, using symmetry conditions on the joint distribution of outcome and selection errors, along with kernel weighting schemes. A ...

How does a redistribution of trade gains affect welfare when income inequality matters? To answer this question, we extend the [1] model to unionized labor markets and heterogeneous workers. As redistribution schemes, we consider unemployment benefits that are financed either by a wage tax, a payroll tax or a profit tax. Assuming that welfare declines in income inequality, we find that welfare ...

Female wages in Bangladesh are significantly lower compared to male wages. This paper seeks to quantify the extent of discrimination in explaining this gender wage gap. We decompose the gender wage differential into a component that can be explained by differences in productive characteristics and a component unexplained by observable productive differences, which are attributed to discriminati...

The Impact of Gender Segregation on Male-Female Wage Differentials: Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data for Spain This paper presents new evidence on the role of gender segregation within industry, occupation, establishment, and occupation-establishment cells in explaining gender wage differentials of full-time salaried workers in Spain during 1995 and 2002. Using data from the Spanish...

Non-agricultural income has become an important source of rural household income and has brought with a wide inequality in rural China. This paper investigates the determinants of non-agricultural employment as well as non-agricultural income and then assesses the contribution of these determinants to income inequality with the Chinese Academy of Social Science 2003 survey data and a three-step...

The recent changes in the U.S. wage structure are often linked to the new wave of capital-embodied information technologies. The existing literature has emphasized either the accelerated pace or the skill-bias of embodied technical progress as the driving force behind the rise in wage inequality. A key, neglected, aspect is the \general purpose" nature of the new information technologies. This ...

To explain these patterns, a variety of theories have been advanced, including those stressing the growth of international trade, changes in institutions (e.g., declining unionization and real minimum wage), rising immigration, and technological change. Growing levels of imports into the United States, for instance, may have hit workers in tradesensitive industries (e.g., textiles and apparel) ...

Inter-industry Wage Dispersion in Portugal: high but falling This paper examines the size of inter-industry wage dispersion in Portugal and compares with other countries. We find that the country has a high inter-industry wage inequality compared with the European standard. Nevertheless, the dispersion reduced over the 1980s and the early 1990s along a process of centralisation of the wage sett...

In this paper we investigate the importance of labor market institutions such as unemployment insurance, unions, …ring regulation and minimum wages for the evolution of male wage inequality across countries. We derive a simple log-linear equation of the wage di¤erential as a function of the institutional parameters, total factor productivity, …nal good prices and relative skill supply. Our esti...

Noncognitive Abilities and Within-Group Wage Inequality This paper argues that endogenous restructuring processes within firms towards productivityenhancing human resource activities, triggered by advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) and rising supply of educated workers, are typically associated with higher demand for noncognitive abilities. Consistent with the evolutio...