The purpose of this chapter is twofold: (1) to provide an accessible introduction to the methods of structural estimation of discrete choice dynamic programming (DCDP) models and (2) to survey the contributions of applications of these methods to substantive and policy issues in labor economics....

We document changes in the structure of earnings during the economic transition in Poland. We find that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially from 1988 to 1996. A common view is that the reallocation of workers from a public sector with a compressed wage distribution, to a private...