The U.S. economy has undergone major structural changes since 1950. First, there has been a gradual shift of employment from goods-producing industries to service-providing industries. Second, since the 1970s at least, the availability of new information-based technologies has made possible...

Recent work has documented a rising degree of wealth inequality in the United States between 1983 and 1998. In this paper we look at another dimension of the distribution: polarization. Using techniques developed by Esteban and Ray (1994) and extended by D'Ambrosia (2001), we examine whether a...

Using both time-series and pooled cross-section, time-series data for 44 industries over the period 1947-1997 in the United States, no evidence is found to support the idea that the growth of skills or educational attainment had any statistically significant effect on growth of earnings. On the...

The mean duration of unemployment has approximately doubled in the U.S. between the early 1950s and the mid-1990s, with most of the increase occurring since the early 1970s. We first construct a simple model linking the average duration of unemployment with the speed of technical change. Using...

The present study examines factors that might explain the difference between female and male industry wage premia. It focuses on three industry characteristics in particular -- the extent to which firms in each industry were likely to be targeted for Affirmation Action compliance review or...

Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, I find that wealth inequality continued to rise in the United States after 1989, though at a reduced rate. The share of the wealthiest 1 percent of households rose by 3.6 percentage points from 1983 to 1989 and by another 0.7 percentage points...

Profitability in the United States has been rising since the early 1980s and by 1997 was at its highest level since its postwar peak in the mid 1960s, and the profit share, by one definition, was at its highest point. In this paper I examine the role of the change in the profit share and capital...

Neither neoclassical nor Keynesian economics displays much patience with the popular notion that technical progress of the labor-saving variety tends to swell the ranks of the unemployed. Those who believe that market forces tend automatically to bring the economy back, if not to "full...

A vast literature in economics has examined the economic progress of African Americans during this century. Most of these studies have focused on income--or on even narrower measures of economic well-being, such as earnings--to assess the extent to which any gains made relative to other racial...