This paper shows how a shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) leads to age and educational disparities between husbands and wives. Empirical support is based on data from a natural experiment commencing before and ending after China's 1980 one-child law. The results...

We examine changes in inequality and instability of the combined earnings of married couples over the 1980-2009 period using two U.S. panel data sets: Social Security earnings data matched to Survey of Income and Program Participation panels (SIPP-SSA) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics....

The approach put forward in this article is based on Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction, the competitive process by which entrepreneurs are always looking for new ideas that will render their rivals' ideas obsolete. I present a model in which the rate of economic growth is sensitive to...

This paper shows how a shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) leads to age and educational disparities between husbands and wives. Empirical support is based on data from a natural experiment commencing before and ending after China's 1980 one-child law. The results...

This paper explores secular changes in women's pay relative to men's pay. It shows how the human capital model predicts a smaller gender wage gap as male-female lifetime work expectations become more similar. The model explains why relative female wages rose almost unabated from 1890 to the...

The initial earnings of U.S. immigrants vary enormously by country of origin. Via three interrelated analyses, we show earnings convergence across source countries with time in the United States. Human-capital theory plausibly explains the inverse relationship between initial earnings and...

We investigate the effects of maternity leave coverage on women's post-birth wages, job tenure, and labor market attachment. We pay particular attention to unobservable characteristics that are correlated with maternity leave coverage and that affect labor market outcomes. We use a control...

The chapter examines how the various dimensions of economic inequality between men and women are analyzed today. Beyond the gender wage gap—a central issue—and of course the still far from equal sharing of housework, the chapter also reviews research on gender inequality in access to...

This paper integrates two strands of literature on overskilling and disability using the 2004 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS). It finds that the disabled are significantly more likely to be mismatched in the labour market, to suffer from a pay penalty and to have lower job...

In der Öffentlichkeit wird oft die These vertreten, daß die zunehmende Ungleichheit der Lohneinkommen ökonomisch geboten, wenn auch gesellschaftspolitisch bedenklich sei. In diesem Beitrag wird gezeigt, daß die Lohnbildung in modernen Arbeitsmärkten nicht dem Prinzip der kompensierenden...