Although the college-high school wage gap for younger men has doubled over the past 30 years, the gap for older men has remained nearly constant. We argue that these shifts reflect changes in the relative supply of highly-educated workers across age groups. Cohorts born in the first half of the...

The standard of living in the industrialized nations has been steadily increasing over the last few decades. Yet some observers wonder whether we are really getting any happier. This paper addresses that question by examining well-being data on 100,000 randomly sampled Americans and Britons from...

We examine the changing relationship between unionization and wage inequality in Canada and the United States. Our study is motivated by profound recent changes in the composition of the unionized workforce. Historically, union jobs were concentrated among low-skilled men in private sector...

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the link between unionization and wage inequality in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. Our main motivation is to see whether unionization can account for differences and trends in wage inequality in industrialized countries. We focus on the U.S., the...

Beginning in 1979 with the newly electted Thatcher Government and continuing under successive Conservative and Labour Governments, the United Kingdom has embarked on a two-decade-long experiment in economic reform. We present evidence that the reform process has succeeded in making the UK more...

Labor force participation of men over age 50 fell sharply in the UK between the early 1970s and early 1990s. Despite the fact that the state retirement pension does not become available to men until age 65, half of men aged 60-64 were economically inactive in the mid 1990s. The main element of...

Following Phillip's original work on the UK, applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time-series data sets. However, it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models. This paper adopts a different...

This paper, which follows in an LSE tradition begun by Phillips and Sargan, examines the role of unemployment in shaping pay. In contrast to most of the literature, it 1) uses microeconometric data on individuals and workplaces 2) examines a variety of data sets as a check on the robustness of...

The paper argues that wage determination is best seen as a kind of rent sharing in which workers' bargaining power is influenced by conditions in the external labour market. It uses British establishment data from 1984 to show that pay depends upon a blend of insider pressure (including the...