The paper reviews recent developments in the literature on wage inequality, with a particular focus on why inequality growth has been particularly concentrated in the top end of the wage distribution over the last 15 years. Several possible institutional and demand-side explanations are...

The paper presents descriptive evidence from quantile regressions and more "structural" estimates from a human capital model with heterogenous returns to show that most of the increase in wage inequality between 1973 and 2005 is due to a dramatic increase in the return to post-secondary...

We examine the incentive effects of transfer programs using a unique policy episode. Prior to 1989, social assistance recipients without children in Quebec who were under age 30 received benefits 60 percent lower than recipients older than 30. We use this sharp discontinuity in policy to...

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the link between unionization and wage inequality in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. Our main motivation is to see whether unionization can account for differences and trends in wage inequality in industrialized countries. We focus on the U.S., the...

We examine the changing relationship between unionization and wage inequality in Canada and the United States. Our study is motivated by profound recent changes in the composition of the unionized workforce. Historically, union jobs were concentrated among low-skilled men in private sector...

This paper looks at the evolution of incomes at the top of the distribution in Canada. Master files of the Canadian Census are used to study the composition of top income earners between 1981 and 2011. Our main finding is that, as in the United States, executives and individuals working in the...

This paper investigates the potential reasons for the surprisingly different labor market performance of the United States, Canada, Germany, and several other OECD countries during and after the Great Recession of 2008-09. Unemployment rates did not change substantially in Germany, increased and...

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of decomposition methods that have been developed since the seminal work of Oaxaca and Blinder in the early 1970s. These methods are used to decompose the difference in a distributional statistic between two groups, or its change over time, into...

This paper provides an introduction and "user guide" to Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs for empirical researchers. It presents the basic theory behind the research design, details when RD is likely to be valid or invalid given economic incentives, explains why it is considered a...

We propose a new regression method to estimate the impact of explanatory variables on quantiles of the unconditional (marginal) distribution of an outcome variable. The proposed method consists of running a regression of the (recentered) influence function (RIF) of the unconditional quantile on...