Cross-national comparisons of earnings inequality can be misleading when unemployment rates and rate of female labor force participation differ across countries. This is because such comparisons implicitly place zero values on underutilized labor market activity and domestic labor. This paper...

This paper attempts to bridge the gap between previous cross-national work estimating rates of return to education and the current trend toward examining rates over time. Changes in the returns to education in the 1980s over five countries were driven by different forces across the countries.