A large empirical literature documents a rise in wage inequality in the American economy. Itis silent on whether the increase in inequality is due to greater heterogeneity in thecomponents of earnings that are predictable by agents or whether it is due to greateruncertainty faced by agents...

The March Current Population Survey (CPS) is the primary data source for estimation oflevels and trends in labor earnings and income inequality in the USA. Time-inconsistencyproblems related to top coding in theses data have led many researchers to use the ratio ofthe 90th and 10th percentiles...

We analyze the association between inequality and growth across 72 labor market regions in Sweden 1990-2006. Highly accurate measures of growth and inequality (gini, Q3, p9075, p5010) are derived from population register data. The regional set-up also reduces problems with omitted variable bias...

This paper presents a comparative overview of mobility patterns in 14 Latin American countries between 1992 and 2003. Using three alternative econometric techniques on constructed pseudo-panels, the paper provides a set of estimators for the traditional notion of income mobility as well as for...

This paper proposes an equilibrium theory of the organization of work in an economy with an implicit market for productive time. In this economy, agents have limited productive time and can choose to produce in autarky, buy productive time from helpers to increase own production or, sell their...

This paper proposes an assignment model where sorting occurs on attributes including both skills (Sattinger, 1979) and preferences (Tinbergen, 1956). The key feature of this model is that the wage function admits both jobs' and workers' attributes as arguments. Since this function is generically...

The importance of noncognitive childhood skills in predicting higher wages is well documented in economics. This paper studies the reverse. Using surveys of lottery winners, we analyze the effects of unearned income on the Big Five personality traits. After correcting for potential endogeneity...

Research on intergenerational income mobility is based on current income since data on lifetime income are typically not available for two generations. However, using snapshots of income over shorter periods causes a so-called life-cycle bias if the snapshots cannot mimic lifetime outcomes....

This paper estimates the extent of intergenerational income mobility in Japan among sons and daughters born between 1935 and 1975. Our estimates rely on a two-sample instrumental variables approach using representative data from the Japanese Social Stratification and Mobility (SSM) surveys,...

Which and how many attributes are relevant for the sorting of agents in a matching market? This paper addresses these questions by constructing indices of mutual attractiveness that aggregate information about agents' attributes. The first k indices for agents on each side of the market provide...