The distribution of income, the rate of pay raises, and the mobility of employees is crucial to understanding labor economics. Although research abounds on the distribution of wages across individuals in the economy, wage differentials within firms remain a mystery to economists. The first effort to examine linked employer-employee data across countries, The Structure of Wages:An International Comparison analyzes labor trends and their institutional background in the United States and eight European countries. A distinguished team of contributors reveal how a rising wage variance rewards star employees at a higher rate than ever before, how talent becomes concentrated in a few firms over time, and how outside market conditions affect wages in the twenty-first century. From a comparative perspective that examines wage and income differences within and between countries such as Denmark, Italy, and the Netherlands, this volume will be required reading for economists and those working in industrial organization.

Between 1979 and 1987 there were three significant changes in the wage structure in the United States. the pecuniary returns to schooling increased by about a third; the wages of older relative to younger workers with relatively low education increased to some extent; and the wages of women relative to men rose by almost ten percent. It is important for policy purposes to know why these changes occurred and whether they are temporary or permanent. The paper investigates several alternative explanations of these wage structure phenomena, including the most popular ones that their principal causes were shifts in the structure of product demand, skilled-labor saving technological change, and changes in the incidence and level of rents received by lower skilled workers. our reading of the evidence suggests that the major cause of the dramatic movements in the wage structure during the 1980's may have been some combination of changes in both production technology and the average relative nonobserved quality of different labor groups.

Comprises essays which describe and analyse the major changes in wage relationships between 1963 and the 1980s. Notes the increase in wage differentials for workers with different levels of schooling as the most pervasive change.

This paper analyzes changes in U.S. earnings differentials in the 1980s between race, gender, age, and schooling groups. There are four main sets of results to report. First, the economic position of less-educated workers declined relative to the more-educated among almost all demographic groups. Education-earnings differentials clearly rose for whites, but less clearly for blacks, while employment rate differences associated with education increased more for blacks than for whites. Second, much of the change in education-earnings differentials for specific groups is attributable to measurable economic factors: to changes in the occupational or industrial structure of employment; to changes in average wages within industries; to the fall in the real value of the minimum wage and the tall in union density; and to changes in the relative growth rate of more-educated workers. Third, the earnings and employment position of white females, and to a lesser extent of black females, converged to that of white males in the 1980s, across education groups. At the same time, the economic position of more-educated black males appears to have worsened relative to their white-male counterparts. Fourth, there has been a sizable college-enrollment response to the rising relative wages of college graduates. This response suggests that education-earnings differentials may stop increasing, or even start to decline, in the near future.

Based on data from the Area Wage Survey for 20 urban labour markets for the period 1974-1991, examines changes in wage inequality in local labour markets during the 1980s.

This paper compares changes in the structure of wages in France, Great Britain, Japan. and the United States over the last twenty years. Wage differentials by education and occupation (skill differentials) narrowed substantially in all four countries in the 1970s. Overall wage inequality and skill differentials expanded dramatically in Great Britain and the United States and moderately in Japan during the 1980s. In contrast, wage inequality did not increase much in France through the mid-1980s. Industrial and occupational shifts favored more-educated workers in all four countries throughout the last twenty years. Reductions in the rate of the growth of the relative supply of college-educated workers in the face of persistent increases in the relative demand for more-skilled labor can explain a substantial portion of the increase in educational wage differentials in the United States, Britain, and Japan in the 1980s. Sharp increases in the national minimum wage (the SM1C) and the ability of French unions to extend contracts even in the face of declining membership helped prevent wage differentials from expanding in France through the mid-1980s.