The model described here provides a central role for policies and institutions that compress the wage structure. For example, unions and progressive income taxes reduce (after-tax) wages at the higher end of the wage distribution while artificially boosting them at the lower end. As a result,...

This paper introduces a tractable general equilibrium overlapping-generations model of human capital accumulation, and shows that it provides a consistent explanation of several key features of the evolution of the U.S. wage distribution from 1970 to 2000. The framework is based on the...

We study how individuals match their skills with an occupation's demands as they choose a career. With data on individuals' test scores for multiple types of skills and work histories, we have a rich description of this process. We quantify the quality of one's occupational match and how it...

This paper studies the quantitative implications of wealth taxation (as opposed to capital income taxation) in an incomplete markets model with return rate heterogeneity across individuals. The key source of heterogeneity comes from the fact that some individuals have better entrepreneurial...

This paper studies how recessions affect individual income risk. We employ a unique and confidential administrative data set with tens of millions of observations on individual earnings histories from the Social Security Administration records. We use a dataset that is a 10% random sample of the...

The first part of this paper estimates a set of stochastic processes with increasing generality to capture these salient features of earnings dynamics to provide a reliable "user's guide" for applied economists. In the second part, we examine if these documented features can be explained in a...

Wage inequality has been significantly higher in the United States than in continental European countries (CEU) since the 1970s. Moreover, this inequality gap has further widened during this period as the US has experienced a large increase in wage inequality, whereas the CEU has seen only...

Wage inequality has been significantly higher in the United States than in continental European countries (CEU) since the 1970s. Moreover, this inequality gap has further widened during this period as the US has experienced a large increase in wage inequality, whereas the CEU has seen only...