This paper explores the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980 and the late 1990s. In contrast to the view that sees minimum wages as an ineffective redistributive tool in developing countries, we find that the...

This paper summarizes inequalities in PC ownership using data from the US Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) and the British General Household Survey (GHS) for the period 1984-98. Between 1988 and 1994, British households were more likely than US households to own a personal computer (PC). After...

A main activity of the state is to redistribute resources. Models of the political process generally predict that a rise in inequality will lead to more redistribution. This paper shows that, for the UK in the period 1983-2004, a plausibly exogenous rise in income inequality has not been...

This paper argues that skill-biased technical change has some deficiencies as a hypothesis about the impact of technology on the labor market and that a more nuanced view recently proposed by Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003) is a more accurate description. The difference between the two hypotheses...

This paper presents a historical database on educational attainment in 74 countries for the period 1870-2010, using perpetual inventory methods before 1960 and then the Cohen and Soto (2007) database. The correlation between the two sets of average years of schooling in 1960 is equal to 0.96. We...

This paper reviews a new framework for analyzing the interrelationship between inequality, unemployment, labor market frictions, and foreign trade. This framework emphasizes firm heterogeneity and search and matching frictions in labor markets. It implies that the opening of trade may raise...

The phenomenon of 'job polarisation' is increasing inequality as the labour market splits into high- and low-wage work. According to Alan Manning, who coined the term a decade ago, we cannot ignore job polarisation - but with sensible policies, we can manage it. Aiming for greater equality in...

The paper uses 18 waves of BHPS data to provide evidence of the roles of both own social status and upward mobility relative to one's parents on job and life satisfaction, preferences for redistribution, pro-public sector attitudes and voting. Both own social status and greater mobility with...

Individual and household based aggregate measures of worklessness can, and do, offer conflicting signalsabout labour market performance. We outline a means of quantifying the extent of any disparity,(polarisation), in the signals stemming from individual and household-based measures of...

There is little doubt that technology has had the most profound effect on altering the tasks that wehumans do in our jobs. Economists have long speculated on how technical change affects boththe absolute demand for labour as a whole and the relative demands for different types of labour.In...