A number of studies have tried to gauge the effect of international trade on the rising U.S. skill premium by examining whether product prices in unskill-intensive sectors have fallen relative to prices in skill-intensive sectors. However, these studies do not estimate what share of domestic...

Economic inequality is higher today than it has been since 1939, as measured by both the wage structure and wealth inequality. But the comparison between 1939 and 1999 is largely made out of necessity; the 1940 U.S. population census was the first to inquire of wage and salary income and...

There has been little analysis of the impact of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on U.S. wage inequality, even though the presence of foreign-owned affiliates in the United States has arguably grown more rapidly in significance for the U.S. economy than trade flows. Using data across U.S....

U.S. educational and occupational wage differentials were exceptionally high at the dawn of the twentieth century and then decreased in several stages over the next eight decades. But starting in the early 1980s the labor market premium to skill rose sharply and by 2005 the college wage premium...

Between 1890 and the late 1920s the premium to high school education declined substantially for both men and women. In 1890 ordinary office workers, whose positions generally required a high school diploma, earned almost twice what production workers did. But by the late 1920s they earned about...

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...