Friday, November 18, 2005

Rising Wage Inequality: The Role of Composition and Prices

"Our analysis reveals that shifts in labor force composition have positively impacted earnings inequality during the 1990s. But these compositional shifts have primarily operated on the lower half of the earnings distribution by muting a contemporaneous, countervailing lower-tail price compression. The steady rise of upper tail inequality since the late 1970s appears almost entirely explained by ongoing between-group price changes (particularly increasing wage differentials by education) and residual price changes." Source: Harvard Institute of Economic Research (Autor, Katz, Kearney)

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