The March Current Population Survey (CPS) is the primary data source for estimation of levels and trends in labor earnings and income inequality in the USA. Time-inconsistency problems related to top coding in theses data have led many researchers to use the ratio of the 90th and 10th...

This paper examines the extent and evolution of intergenerational earnings mobility in France. We use data from five waves of the French Education-Training-Employment (FQP) surveys covering the period 1964 to 1993. Our estimation procedure follows Björklund and Jäntti (1997)’s two-sample...

International comparisons of minimum-wage levels have largely focused on the gross value of minimum wages, ignoring the effects of taxation on both labour costs and the net income of employees. This paper presents estimates of the tax burdens facing minimum-wage workers. These are used as a...

This paper summarizes the main findings of the recent studies that have constructed top income and wealth shares series over the century for a number of countries using tax statistics. Most countries experience a dramatic drop in top income shares in the first part of the century due to a...

This paper develops a simple equilibrium model of CEO pay. CEOs have different talents and are matched to firms in a competitive assignment model. In market equilibrium, a CEO%u2019s pay changes one for one with aggregate firm size, while changing much less with the size of his own firm. The...

This paper develops a theoretical model that relates changes in educational inequality to the combined effects of innovations that have increased the relative demand for more educated labor and innovations that have increased ability premiums. Under the assumption that in the long run individual...

This paper uses Social Security Administration longitudinal earnings micro data since 1937 to analyze the evolution of inequality and mobility in the United States. Earnings inequality follows a U-shape pattern, decreasing sharply up to 1953 and increasing steadily afterwards. We find that...

The March Current Population Survey (CPS) is the primary data source for estimation of levels and trends in labor earnings and income inequality in the USA. Time-inconsistency problems related to top coding in theses data have led many researchers to use the ratio of the 90th and 10th...

Contracts in a dynamic model must address a number of issues absent from static frameworks. Shocks to firm value may weaken the incentive effects of securities (e.g. cause options to fall out of the money), and the impact of some CEO actions may not be felt until far in the future. We derive the...

A recent "revisionist " literature characterizes the pronounced rise in U.S. wage inequality since 1980 as an "episodic " event of the first-half of the 1980s driven by non-market factors (particularly a falling real minimum wage) and concludes that continued increases in wage inequality since...