Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” years saw GDP per capita rise from 60% of the EU average to 120% of the average over the course of the 1990s, with a growth in employment of about 40% over the period 1994-2001. What were the consequences of the boom for returns to education and wage inequality? This paper uses data from the Living in Ireland Survey for 1994, 1997 and 2001 to examine wage inequality, th...

Theoretical research in international trade increasingly focuses on …rm heterogeneity in di¤erentiated product markets following Melitz (2003). A key implication of this line of research is that …rms are unevenly affected by trade liberalization: low productivity …rms exit, intermediate-productivity domestic …rms contract, and high-productivity exporting …rms expand. More recent theoretical res...

This paper attempts to understand the forces that have lead to persistent racial wage inequality by developing a dynamic model of statistical discrimination that accounts for the transmission of earnings across generations. The parameters of this model are then estimated using data from the 1970 and 1990 U.S. Census. The results indicate that racial disparities in the quality of information tha...

Acknowledging that wage inequality and intergenerational mobility are strongly interrelated, this paper presents a model in which both are jointly determined. The model enables us to study how inequality and mobility are affected by exogenous changes and what determines their correlation. A main implication of the model is that differences in the amount of public subsidies to education and educ...

This pooled, cross-sectional, time-series study assesses the impact of health system variables on the relationship between wage inequality and infant mortality in 19 OECD countries over the period 1970-1996. Data are derived from the OECD, World Value Surveys, Luxembourg Income Study, and political economy databases. Analyses include Pearson correlation and fixed-effects multivariate regression...

This paper provides some empirical evidence and a theory of the relationship between residual wage inequality and the increasing dispersion of capital/labor ratios across ...rms. I document the increasing variance of capital/labor ratios across ...rms in the US labor market using Compustat data. I also show that the increase in the variance of capital/labor ratios across ...rms is related to th...

We develop semiparametric and instrumental-variables approaches to self-selection problems in comparisons of wage inequality between educational groups. We propose new estimators to identify the causal effect of college education on scale parameters of wage distributions, using symmetry conditions on the joint distribution of outcome and selection errors, along with kernel weighting schemes. A ...

Elvira, Saporta / COLLECTIVE BARGAINING The authors study the effect of unionization on gender wage differentials for production workers in nine U.S. manufacturing industries. They find that the wage gap is significantly smaller in unionized establishments for six of the industries, even after controlling for occupation and establishment gender composition. But this union effect does not hold w...

How does a redistribution of trade gains affect welfare when income inequality matters? To answer this question, we extend the [1] model to unionized labor markets and heterogeneous workers. As redistribution schemes, we consider unemployment benefits that are financed either by a wage tax, a payroll tax or a profit tax. Assuming that welfare declines in income inequality, we find that welfare ...