Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-section data, we may confuse older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates transitory...

Using a regression decomposition approach, we find that, during the 1980s, the growth in the relative educational attainment of older workers has contributed to about one-quarter of the increase in the age-wage gap of men and women. During the 1990s, the age-wage gap increased to a much lesser...