This paper covers a continuous and longer time period than previously possible to examine human and market capital because of research by Christian (2017). This paper focuses on the presentation and analysis of trends in human capital by gender. During 1975-2012 there were significant changes in...

What is the impact of firms' productivity shocks on workers' labor earnings? To answer this question, we propose a novel approach to identify firms' productivity shocks that combines a nonparametric production function estimation method with a set of two-way fixed effect regressions to control...

The canonical supply-demand model of the wage returns to skill has been extremely influential; however, it has faced several important challenges. Several studies show that the standard approach sometimes produces theoretically wrong-signed elasticities of substitution, yields counterintuitive...

For a large set of countries, we document how the labor earnings inequality varies with GDP per capita. As countries get richer, the mean-to-median ratio and the Gini coefficient decline. Yet, this decline masks divergent patterns: while inequality at the top of the earnings distribution falls,...

This paper investigates how much of the difference in wage distributions is related to differences in skill distributions and whether a compressed wage distribution is associated with high unemployment across core OECD countries. Some countries that have more compressed (dispersed) wage...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

We study the links between the Mincerian wage equation (the cross-sectional relationship between wages and years of schooling) and the human capital production function (the causal effect of schooling on labor productivity). Based on a stylized Mincerian general equilibrium model with imperfect...

I develop an assignment model of occupations with multidimensional heterogeneity in production tasks and worker skills. Tasks are distributed continuously in the skill space, whereas workers have a discrete distribution with a finite number of types. Occupations arise endogenously as bundles of...

This paper incorporates assignment frictions and sector-specific training into the Roy model of occupational choice. Assignment frictions represent the extent of the market whereas differences in sector-specific training reflect worker specialization. This framework thus captures Adam Smith's...

In this study we argue that wage inequality and occupational mobility are intimately related. We are motivated by our empirical findings that human capital is occupation-specific and that the fraction of workers switching occupations in the United States was as high as 16% a year in the early...