The closing of the gender wage gap is an ongoing phenomenon in industrialized countries. However, research has been limited in its ability to understand the causes of these changes, due in part to an inability to directly compare the work of women to that of men. In this study, we use a new...

In recent decades, most developed countries have experienced a simultaneous increase in income inequality and management compensation. In this paper, we study the relation between management compensation and firm-level income dynamics in a general equilibrium model. Empirical estimation, of the...

This paper investigates the changes in the German wage structure for full-time working males from 1999 to 2006. Our analysis builds on the task-based approach introduced by Autor et al. (2003), as implemented by Spitz-Oener (2006) for Germany, and also accounts for job complexity. We perform a...

This paper presents a general equilibrium assignment model of workers to tasks with endogenous human capital formation and multidimensionality of skills. The model has 2 key features. First, skills are endogenous and multidimensional. Second, two types of assignment occur, workers self-select...

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...

Wage inequality in Portugal increased over the last quarter of century. The period from 1982 to 1995 witnessed strong increases in both upper- and lower-tail inequality. A shortage of skills combined with skill-biased technological changes are at the core of this evolution. Since 1995,...

This paper studies a model of the distribution of income under bounded needs. Utility derived from any given good reaches a bliss point at a finite consumption level of that good. On the other hand, introducing new varieties always increases utility. It is assumed that each variety is owned by a...

To explain the rise in the college wage premium in developed economies in the past decades, the present paper examines the effects of technological progress on workers effort incentives, which determine the effective labor supply. Five effort incentive effects of technological progress are...

This paper utilizes the self-employed to analyze the observed increase in the educational earnings premium in the 1980's. The paper compares the predictions of the signaling and human capital models in response to an exogenous demand shock such as a skill-biased technological change. Since the...