Capital deepening may affect the evolution of the wage differential between skilled and unskilled workers differently in countries with different labor market institutions. If labor market institutions raise the relative wage of unskilled workers in Germany, firms have incentives to invest...

Standard search models are unreliable for structural inference of the underlying sources of wage inequality because they are inconsistent with observed residual wage dispersion. We address this issue by modeling skill development and duration dependence in unemployment benefits in a random on...

In the US labor market the average black worker is exposed to a lower employment rate and earns a lower wage compared to his white counterpart. Lang and Lehmann (2012) argue that these mean differences mask substantial heterogeneity along the distribution of workers' skill. In particular, they...

A wide class of models with On-the-Job Search (OJS) predicts that workers gradually select into better-paying jobs, until lay-off occurs, when this selection process starts over from scratch. We develop a simple methodology to test these predictions. Our inference uses two sources of...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

We use a rich new body of data on the experiences of unemployed job-seekers to determine the sources of wage dispersion and to create a search model consistent with the acceptance decisions the job-seekers made. From the data and the model, we identify the distributions of four key variables:...

This paper focuses on the differences in earnings and labor force status of low-skilled prime age men in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States at the end of the 20th century, and their relation to the differences in wage dispersion. In the UK and the US, where the bottom of the wage...

In the US labor market the average black worker is exposed to a lower employment rate and earns a lower wage compared to his white counterpart. Lang and Lehmann (2012) argue that these mean differences mask substantial heterogeneity along the distribution of workers' skill. In particular, they...

Standard search models are inconsistent with the amount of frictional wage dispersion found in U.S. data. We resolve this apparent puzzle by modeling skill development (learning by doing on the job, skill loss during unemployment) and duration dependence in unemployment benefits in a random on...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...