The evolution of U.S. earnings inequality: 1961?2002

By Zwi Eckstein, Eva Nagypal. 2004

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The goal of this article is to summarize the main trends in the earnings and employment distribution in the United States using data drawn from the March Current Population Surveys covering the period between 1961 and 2002. We show that inequality started to increase for men in 1974, and for women in 1981, and for both genders inequality continued to increase throughout 2002. During the same period the wage premium of college graduates over non-college workers increased substantially and the ratio of college educated workers to non-college workers also increased. These facts support the popular skill-biased technical change (SBTC) hypothesis. However, other facts raise some doubts about the SBTC hypothesis. First, the college wage premium is mainly due to workers with a postgraduate degree, but their increase in the labor force started much earlier than the spectacular rise in their wages. Also there has been no marked change in recent decades in the occupational distribution of workers. However, the earning premium of professional over blue collar workers followed the same trend as the college earning premium. And finally, the most dramatic changes in the labor market took place among women.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/546c7aa291e8f808d9a796be68de0454c2423699

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Citations in the corpus

Estimating a Dynamic Adverse-Selection Model: Labour-Force Experience and the Changing Gender Earnings Gap 1968–1997 (2008, methodology): “The increase in productivity in the professional occupations relative to the nonprofessional occupations is consistent with the increase in women's representation in the professional occupations, as is documented in Table 1 and other literature (see Lewis, 1996).(29) Our theoretical model implies th”
Spain is Different: Falling Trends of Inequality (2009, methodology): “As Eckstein and Nagypal (2004), we run year by year Mincer regressions of logged hourly wages against a dummy for tertiary education, a dummy for gender and four age group dummies (25-35, 36-45, 46-55, 56-60).”
The Macroeconomic Implications of Rising Wage Inequality in the United States (2008, unknown): “The model reproduces both the magnitude and the timing of this increase.(31) Panel (C) of the figure indicates that each component of the wage process plays an important role in determining the overall evolution of the wage-hour correlation.”
Innovation and skill dynamics: a life-cycle approach (2015, background): “…premium and of wage dispersion in the college cohort (or higher) are highly correlated to a substantial increase of the post-graduate wage premium (Eckstein and Nagypal, 2004); and, second, evidence on the relation between university quality and earnings (e.g. Brewer et al., 1999) shows that the…”
The Structural Estimation of Behavioral Models: Discrete Choice Dynamic Programming Methods and Applications (2011, background): “Recent contributions to this literature include Baldwin and Cain (2000), Eckstein and Nagypal (2004), Hornstein et. al.”