This essay discusses the effect of technical change on wage inequality. I argue that the behavior of wages and returns to schooling indicates that technical change has been skill-biased during the past sixty years. Furthermore, the recent increase in inequality is most likely due to an...

We estimate substitution possibilities among a set of age-race-sex groups in the labor force. The estimates are based on cross-section data from SMSAs in 1969,and they allow us to consider how substitutable adult women are for young women or young men. The estimates are used, along with...

In this paper, I develop a model to analyze how skill premia differ over time and across countries, and use this model to study the impact of international trade on wage inequality. Skill premia are determined by technology and the relative supply of skills. An increase in the relative supply of...

The immense literature on discrimination treats outcomes as relative: One group suffers compared to another. But does a difference arise because agents discriminate against others--are exophobic--or because they favor their own kind--are endophilic? This difference matters, as the relative...

We develop a theory of the market for individual reputation, an indicator of regard by one's peers and others. The central questions are: 1) Does the quantity of exposures raise reputation independent of their quality? and 2) Assuming that overall quality matters for reputation, does the quality...

The distribution of job satisfaction widened across cohorts of young men in the United States between 1978 and 1988, and between 1978 and 1996, in ways correlated with changing wage inequality. Satisfaction among workers in upper earnings quantiles rose relative to that of workers in lower...

We link information on the current earnings of college graduates from many cohorts to their high-school records, their detailed college records and their demographics to infer the impact of college major on earnings. We develop an estimator to handle the potential for non-response bias and...

We exploit the changes in the distribution of family income to estimate the effect of parental resources on college education. Our strategy exploits the fact that families at the bottom of the income distribution were much poorer in the 1990s than they were in the 1970s, while the opposite is...

The economics profession has made considerable progress in understanding the increase in wage inequality in the U.S. and the UK over the past several decades, but currently lacks a consensus on why inequality did not increase, or increased much less, in (continental) Europe over the same time...

Average schooling in US states is highly correlated with state wage levels, even after controlling for the direct effect of schooling on individual wages. We use an instrumental variables strategy to determine whether this relationship is driven by social returns to education. The instrumentals...