Using a linked employer-employee data set of the German manufacturing sector, this paper analyses the role of exporting establishments in explaining rising wage dispersion. Over the period of analysis (1996–2007), the raw wage diff erential between exporters and domestic establishments increased substantially, which can only partly be attributed to corresponding changes in human capital endowme...

Capital accumulation can modify the relative productivity between skilled and unskilled workers, leading to changes in the wage structure. In particular, if capital goods are relatively more complementary to skilled workers, a positive correlation between investment in physical capital and the wage premium would be expected. In this paper, we present evidence for this hypothesis by taking advan...

This paper presents new evidence that increases in college enrollment lead to a decline in the quality of college graduates between 1960 and 2000, resulting in a decrease of 9 percentage points in the college premium. A standard demand and supply framework can qualitatively account for the trend in the college and age premia over this period, but the quantitative adjustments that need to be mad...

We decompose the beauty premium in an experimental labor market where ‘employers’ determine wages of ‘workers’ who perform a maze-solving task. This task requires a true skill which we show to be unaffected by physical attractiveness. We find a sizable beauty premium and can identify three transmission channels. (1) Physically-attractive workers are more confident and higher confidence increase...

This paper provides new evidence on the impacts of trade reforms on wages. Instead of achieving identification by comparing industrial wages before and after one episode of trade liberalization, our strategy exploits the recent historical record of policy changes adopted by Argentina: from significant protection in the early 1970s, to the first episode of liberalization during the late 1970s, b...

Although wage inequality has evolved in advanced countries over recent decades, it remains unknown the extent to which changes and their differences across are attributable specific capital labor quantities. We examine this issue by estimating a sector-level production function extended allow for capital–skill complementarity factor-biased technological change using cross-country cross-industry...

We quantify the impact of several determinants of changes in US between-group inequality. We use an assignment framework with many labor groups, equipment types, and occupations in which changes in inequality are driven by changes in workforce composition, occupation demand, computerization, and labor productivity. We parameterize the model using direct measures of computer usage within labor g...