This paper uses data from the Luxembourg Income Study to explore the role of differences in supply shifts in explaining cross-national differences in the rise in earnings inequality. Changes in returns to age and education are estimated for eight countries using a common specification of...

This paper explores the wage and job dynamics of less-skilled workers by estimating a structural model in which agents choose among jobs that differ in initial wage and wage growth. The model also formalizes the intuitive notion that some of these jobs offer "stepping stones" to better jobs. The...

This paper revisits the old question of whether wage growth differs by education level. The paper makes both a methodological and a substantive contribution by offering a new strategy for separately identifying returns to tenure, experience, and job match. Our empirical results, based on the...

This paper tracks distributional changes over the last quarter of the twentieth century. We focus on three conceptually distinct distributions: the distribution of wages, the distribution of annual earnings and the distribution of total family income adjusted for family size. We show that all...

This paper provides an explicit welfare basis for evaluating economic mobility. Our social welfare function can be seen as a natural dynamic extension of the static social welfare function presented in Atkinson and Bourguignon (1982). Unlike Atkinson and Bourguignon, we use social preferences a...

This paper explores the claim that college educated workers are increasingly likely to be in "non-college" occupations. We provide a conceptual framework which gives analytical content to the previously vague distinction between college and non-college jobs. This framework is used to show that...