What Are the Causes of Rising Wage Inequality in the United States?

[...]This paper is an interim report on continuingwork that we began in 1988. Our earlier research on thecauses of wage structure changes in the 1980s (Bound andJohnson 1992) showed that part of explanation A (theslowdown in the growth rate of that fraction of the workforce with high levels of schooling) and especially explanationD were the most plausible; explanations B and C,within our methodological framework, did not appear tobe very important. However, an explanation (of anything)that involves technological change is necessarily circumstantial(as opposed to the “smoking gun” type of evidence),and there is clearly a distribution of opinion in theemerging literature on the question of the relative explanatorypower of A, B, C, and D.[...]