This paper studies collective bargaining and industry wage levels using microdata and quantile regression techniques for the U.S., Britain, West Germany, Austria, Sweden and Norway for the 1980s. The U.S. has higher industry wage differentials and union wage effects than other countries, with...

This paper studies the considerably higher level of wage inequality in the United States than in nine other OECD countries. We find that the greater overall U.S. wage dispersion primarily reflects substantially more compression at the bottom of the wage distribution in the other countries. While...