The structure of wages narrowed considerably during the 1940's, increased slightly during the 1950's and 1960's, and then expanded greatly after 1970. The era of wage stretching of the past two decades has been a current focus, but we return attention here to the decade that was witness to an...

This paper exploits a rich and largely untapped source of information on the wages and other characteristics of individual manufacturing plants to cast new light on recent changes in the United States wage structure. Our primary data source, the Longitudinal Research Datafile (LRD) , contains...

This paper measures and compares the relative earnings of French and English speakers in Canada, and of Spanish and English speakers in the U.S., in the 1970s and 1980s. In Canada, the earnings gap between French and English speakers narrowed over time, especially in Quebec. This decline appears...

This paper examines changes in wage differentials by educational attainment and experience in the US. and Japan since the early 1970s. While educational earnings differentials have expanded dramatically in the U.S. in the 1980s, the college wage premium has increased only slightly in Japan. In...

The starting point of this study is the proposition that intensive formation of human capital on the job is the basic proximate reason for the strong degree of worker attachment to the firm in Japan. The greater emphasis on training and retraining, much of it specific to the firm, results also...

This paper examines the magnitude of changes in relative wages across industries between 1860 and 1983 and analyzes the macroeconomic determinants of such changes at different intervals during this period. The variance across industries in wage growth was at least four times larger before 1948...

Using panel data on individual labor income histories from 1957 to 2013, we document two empirical facts about the distribution of lifetime income in the United States. First, from the cohort that entered the labor market in 1967 to the cohort that entered in 1983, median lifetime income of men...

Improvement in human capital is often presumed important for state economic development, but little research links better education to state incomes. We develop detailed measures of worker skills in each state that incorporate cognitive skills from state- and country-of-origin achievement tests....

Combining confidential Census worker and firm data, we find three key results. First, employees at more productive firms earn higher pay at all earnings levels. Second, this pay-productivity relationship strengthens with seniority, doubling from an elasticity of 0.07 for pay on productivity for...

This paper studies the effects of automation in economies with labor market distortions that generate worker rents--wages above opportunity cost--in some jobs. We show that automation targets high-rent tasks, dissipating rents and amplifying wage losses from automation. It also reduces...