The purpose of this paper is to explain the causes of long-run movements in the parallel market premium in the pre-and-post revolution Iranian economy. The paper suggests that the premium is affected by both real and monetary shocks. Non-spurious co-integration results indicate that negative oil revenue shocks and a revolution-induced exogenous capital outflow caused the parallel market paralle...

The U.K. skill premium fell from the 1950s to the late 1970s and then rose very sharply. This paper examines the contributions to these relative wage movements of international trade and technical change. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth. Then we relate price and TFP changes to a set of underlying factors. Among a number of results, we find ...

Wage inequality in the United States has grown substantially in the past two decades. Standard supply-demand analysis in the empirics of inequality (e.g. Katz and Murphy (1992)) indicates that we may attribute some of this trend to an outward shift in the demand for high skilled labor. In this paper we examine a simple static channel in which the wage premium for skill may grow increased firm e...

We develop a model in which individuals choose education to improve their earnings and regulate the cultural traits they acquire via social transmission. When education makes individuals more receptive to mainstream culture, minority groups underinvest in education as a form of cultural resistance. Economic and cultural incentives interact in surprising ways that increase income inequality. An ...

The singular focus of public debate on the "top 1 percent" of households overlooks the component of earnings inequality that is arguably most consequential for the "other 99 percent" of citizens: the dramatic growth in the wage premium associated with higher education and cognitive ability. This Review documents the central role of both the supply and demand for skills in shaping inequality, di...

We show that individual investors over-extrapolate from their personal experience when making savings decisions. Investors who experience particularly rewarding outcomes from saving in their 401(k)-a high average and/or low variance return-increase their 401(k) savings rate more than investors who have less rewarding experiences with saving. This finding is not driven by aggregate time-series s...

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on “Cross Sectional Facts for Macroeconomists”. The issue documents, for nine countries, the level and the evolution, over time and over the life cycle, of several dimensions of economic inequality, including wages, labor earnings, income, consumption, and wealth. After describing the motivation and the ...

The Effect of Firm-Level Contracts on the Structure of Wages: Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data In Spain, as in several other European countries, sectoral bargaining agreements are automatically extended to cover all firms in an industry. Employers and employees can also negotiate firm-specific contracts. We use a large matched employer-employee data set to study the effects of firm-...

Although a growing body of literature identifies the within-firm redistribution effects trade, research on adjustment processes in labor markets remains scarce. This study analyzes working hours and wages by considering workers’ educational background gender response to change offshoring. Matched worker–firm panel data Japanese manufacturing sector covering 1998 2014 are used. The analysis lead...