The wage premium for high-skilled workers in the United States, measured as the ratio of the 90th-to-10th percentiles from the wage distribution, increased by 20 percent from the 1970s to the late 1980s. A large literature has emerged to explain this phenomenon. A leading explanation is that...

This paper looks at the time-series behavior of the real wage relative to that of productivity. Given an exogenous, nonstationary process for productivity, we use a simple model of dynamic labor demand to show that the real wage and the marginal product of labor will be cointegrated if the...

This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at the conference "Nominal Rigidities" held in San Francisco on June 16 under the joint sponsorship of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

The wage premium for high-skilled workers in the United States, measured as the ratio of the 90th-to-10th percentiles from the wage distribution, increased by 20 percent from the 1970s to the late 1980s. A large literature has emerged to explain this phenomenon. A leading explanation is that...