In recent decades the United States has experienced a pronounced widening of its wage structure. For the most part, analysis of the recent rise in wage inequality has taken place with the benefits of hindsight—that is, without placing recent changes in the wage structure in historical context....

During the 1940s, racial differences in wages narrowed at an unusually rapid pace. Using a decomposition technique different from that of previous studies, the author shows that wage compression between and within groups—the so-called “Great Compressionâ€â€”was a major...

America's expansion to one of the richest nations in the world was partly due to a steady increase in labor productivity, which in turn depends upon the invention and deployment of new technologies and on investments in both human and physical capital. The accumulation of human capital-the...