We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper’s motivating evidence we also...

This paper examines change in wage gaps in urban China by estimating quantile regressions on CHIPS data. It applies the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition, finding sharp increases in inequality from 1988 to 1995 and from 2002 to 2008 largely due to changes in the wage structure. The analysis...

Although theory predicts that international trade will decrease the relative demand for skilled workers in relatively skill-deficit countries, in recent decades many developing countries have experienced rising wage premiums for skilled workers. We examines this puzzle by quantifying the...

This paper analyzes the impact of labor market competition and skill-biased technical change on the structure of compensation. The model combines multitasking and screening, embedded into a Hotelling-like framework. Competition for the most talented workers leads to an escalating reliance on...

This paper analyzes the impact of labor market competition and skill-biased technical change on the structure of compensation. The model combines multitasking and screening, embedded into a Hotelling-like framework. Competition for the most talented workers leads to an escalating reliance on...

This paper challenges the view that the wage structure in West-Germany has remained stable throughout the 80s and 90s. Based on a 2 % sample of social security records, we show that wage inequality has increased in the 1980s, but only at the top of the distribution. In the early 1990s, wage...