Increasing Inequality in Lifetime Earnings: A Tale of Educational Upgrading and Changing Employment Patterns

Temporary Employment and Increasing Earnings Inequality

Temporary workers make up a sizeable part of the labor force in many countries, including Korea. This paper uses an extension of a standard efficiency wage model to explain the wage gap between temporary and permanent workers. Temporary workers have a chance to become permanent; this possibility – combined with the existence of an employment rent for permanent workers – gives short-term workers...

Patterns of Employment and Earnings in Madagascar

Earnings Inequality and the Changing Association between Spouses' Earnings.

Increases in the association between spouses' earnings have the potential to increase inequality as marriages increasingly consist of two high-earning or two low-earning partners. This article uses log-linear models and data from the March Current Population Survey to describe trends in the association between spouses' earnings and estimate their contribution to growing earnings inequality amon...

Commentary: Causes of Changing Earnings Inequality

In the first half of this stimulating paper, Dennis Snower gives us a review of the existing academic literature on inequality. His bottom line is that some of the inequality appears to derive from globalization, deindustrialization, and technological change, but a significant degree of inequality and several other features of wage behavior remain unexplained. Snower then suggests an answer, wh...

General Discussion: Causes of Changing Earnings Inequality

Mr. Crockett: May I make an analogy and see whether it conveys any insights? In the finance field, we think of technology and liberalization as having driven the enormous changes in financial markets. Technology enables the better pricing of risk; liberalization allows risk to be more efficiently managed and traded. Could one say that something similar is taking place in labor markets? Technolo...