New information and communication technologies, we argue, have been 'power-biased': they have allowed firms to monitor low-skill workers more closely, thus reducing the power of these workers. An efficiency wage model shows that 'power-biased technical change' in this sense may generate rising...

US earnings inequality has increased dramatically since the 1970s, and the prospect of a reversal depends on what caused the trend. The standard explanation emphasizes skill-biased technical change. This paper briefly considers some aggregation issues and then proceeds to outline two alternative...

This paper is concerned with the measurement of social distance, clustering, or polarization between workers of a given society. This concept is fundamentally different from that of inequality and thus cannot be measured by any Lorenz consistent index. Similarly, it cannot be additively...