This paper develops a model of wage distribution and wage dynamics based on assignment and Pareto learning. The model matches a large number of key facts about wage distribution and wage dynamics. The tractability of Pareto learning allows us to derive joint implications on the wage distribution and wage dynamics as assignment becomes more important. Our model also provides a natural framework ...

Gender wage and employment gaps are negatively correlated across countries. We argue that non-random selection of women into work explains an important part of such correlation and thus of the observed variation in wage gaps. The idea is that, if women who are employed tend to have relatively high-wage characteristics, low female employment rates may become consistent with low gender wage gaps ...

Change in income inequality in Taiwan from 1964 to 1995 is sensitive to how household incomes are adjusted for household composition. The reasonable practice of dividing household income by persons (or adults) in the household eliminates the widely noted increase in income inequality from 1980 to 1995, and calls into question whether income inequality decreased substantially from 1964 to 1975. ...

I review the two most popular explanations for the differential trends in wage inequality in US/ UK and Europe: that relative supply of skills increased faster in Europe, and that European labour market institutions prevented inequality from increasing. Although these explanations go some way towards accounting for the differential cross-country inequality trends, it also appears that relative ...

Fears of rising income inequalities loom large in recent discussions of how globalization and in particular migration are affecting economies and societies [1]. This paper addresses the question how labor immigration is related to wage inequality by using a specific-factors trade model. We show that the impact of immigration of low or highly skilled labor on wage inequality depends mainly on th...

We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit in four sub-intervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a good approximation to the wage structure and can explain nearly all of the dramatic rise in West German w...

This paper compares trends in wage inequality in the U.S. and Germany using an approach developed by MaCurdy and Mroz (1995) to separate age, time, and cohort effects. Between 1979 and 2004, wage inequality increased strongly in both the U.S. and Germany but there were various country specific aspects of this increase. For the U.S., we find faster wage growth since the 1990s at the top (80% qua...