Several recent studies have found that earnings inequality in Canada has grown considerably since the late 1970's. Using an extraordinary data base drawn from longitudinal income tax records, we decompose this growth in earnings inequality into its persistent and transitory components. We find...

We document that between 50% and 70% of changes in the US wage structure over the last four decades are accounted for by the relative wage declines of worker groups specialized in routine tasks in industries experiencing rapid automation. We develop a conceptual framework where tasks across a...

The entry of married women into the labor force and the rise in women's relative wages are amongst the most notable economic developments of the twentieth century. The growth in these indicators was particularly pronounced in the 1970s and 1980s, but it stalled since the early 1990s, especially...

Using rich administrative and household survey data spanning 34 years from 1985 to 2018, we document a series of new facts on earnings inequality and dynamics in a developing country with a large informal sector: Brazil. Since the mid-1990s, both inequality and volatility of earnings have...

We use a large, representative panel data set from India with monthly data on household finances to examine the incidence of economic harms during the COVID pandemic. We observe a sharp spike in poverty, peaking during India's sharp but short lockdown. However, there was a striking decrease in...

Critics have said that affirmative action is at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. In particular, it has been argued that if affirmative action helps anybody, it helps only the highly educated cream of the minority population, and may perversely work to the detriment of the...

Recent decades have witnessed a sharp increase in the labor force participation of married women. The paper investigates the effect of wives' earnings on family income distribution. This effect depends on the in-equality of women's earnings as compared with other sources of income, on the...

In this paper, we will investigate the effect of six factors on occupational earnings inequality across all occupations in our sample and across occupations in five major Census subgroups. Those six factors are: differences in tasks, different levels of efficiency, institutional factors, time...

We take advantage of our longitudinal data to explore individual variation in the parameters of individual earnings functions. (1) For this purpose we fit an earnings function to each of the individual histories in the sample.(2) We then try to ascertain the extent to which the estimated...