Wage differentials between skill groups are larger in the US than in most western European countries. Especially low skilled workers are relatively worse off in the US than elsewhere. A simple demand and supply explanation for this fact would be that relative net supply of low skilled workers in...

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...