Social scientists are often interested in assessing relative changes between two groups over time, for example, the convergence of black-white wages from 1940 to 1990. In such situations, we need a control group for both treatment groups to remove biases resulting from time trends and unobserved...

We present a detailed decomposition method and provide a Stata estimator to assess relative changes between two groups over time in a synthetic cohort analysis. Using the convergence of black–white wage gap between 1960 and 1970 as an example, we show that education accounts for 73% of the...

A large fraction of the variation in wage levels and wage growth rates among individuals remains unexplained. Economists argue that ?unobserved? heterogeneity is among the more likely reasons for this unexplained variation in wages. The source of individual heterogeneity is typically attributed...

A large fraction of the variation in wage levels and wage growth rates among individuals remains unexplained. Economists argue that unobservedʺ heterogeneity is among the more likely reasons for this unexplained variation in wages. The source of individual heterogeneity is typically attributed...