Wage Inequality in the United Kingdom, 1975-99 This paper uses micro data from the New Earnings Survey to document that cross-sectional wage inequality in the U.K., which rose sharply in the 1980s and continued to rise moderately through the mid-1990s, has remained essentially unchanged in the latter half of the 1990s. As in the U.S., changes in within-group inequality are shown to account for ...

Adapting methods from complex system analysis, this paper analyzes the features of the complex relationship between wage inequality and the development and industrialization of a country. Development is understood as a combination of a monetary index, GDP per capita, and a recently introduced measure of a country's economic complexity: Fitness. Initially the paper looks at wage inequality on a ...

A large literature has documented an increase of U.S. wage inequality over the past several decades. This paper asks how far one can go towards accounting for the evolution of several measures of U.S. wage inequality based on a stochastic human capital model. The model features four school levels with distinct labor types and skill prices and Ben-Porath style human capital accumulation on the j...

Performance pay is of growing importance to the wage structure as it applies to a rising share of employees. At the same time wage dispersion is growing continuously. This leads to the question of how the growing use of performance pay schemes is related to the increase in wage inequality? German SOEP data for the years 1984 to 2009 confirm the large increase in the application of performance p...

Much research (surveyed in Katz and Autor, 1999) documents a substantial widening of the U.S. wage structure since the late 1970s, driven by increases in educational wage differentials and residual wage inequality. The growth in wage inequality was most rapid during the 1980s, and involved a spreading out of the entire wage distribution. Rapid secular growth in the demand for skills, partly fro...

We analyze wage growth and changes in wage inequality in eleven European countries between 1994 and 2001. The data base used throughout is the User Data Base (UDB) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The decomposition analysis is carried out independently for both genders. Following Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1991 and 1993) we split the current wage into components to isolate the fo...

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent among women. Inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent in this period. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the shrinking weight of the union wage distribution. We also argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity r...

Evolution of the Industrial Wage Structure in China Since 1980 Industry mean wages in China have exhibited sharply increased dispersion since the early 1990s. The upward trend in differences of average wages among major industry groups parallels increases in wage and income inequality not only between rural and urban sectors but within the urban economy as well. Research on the trend has focuse...

This paper investigates the changes in the German wage structure for full– time working males from 1999 to 2006. Our analysis builds on the task–based approach introduced by Autor et al. (2003), as implemented by Spitz-Oener (2006) for Germany, and also accounts for job complexity. We perform a Blinder–Oaxaca type decomposition of the changes in the entire wage distribution between 1999 and 200...

This paper explores the macroeconomic and welfare implications of the sharp rise in US wage inequality (1967-1995). In the data, cross-sectional earnings variation increased substantially more than wage variation, due to a sharp rise in the wage-hours correlation. On the contrary, inequality in hours worked, consumption and wealth (excluding the top 1%) remained roughly constant through time. U...