Using microdata to analyze the gender pay gap in ten industrialized nations, the authors focus on the role of wage structure--the prices of labor market skills in influencing the gender gap. They find wage structure enormously important in explaining why the U.S. gender gap is higher than that...

This paper studies the considerably higher level of wage inequality in the United States than in nine other OECD countries. The authors find that the greater overall U.S. wage dispersion primarily reflects substantially more compression at the bottom of the wage distribution in the other...

Using Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics data for 1979 and 1988, the authors analyze how a falling gender wage gap occurred despite changes in wage structure unfavorable to low-wage workers. The decrease is traced to 'gender-specific' factors which more than counterbalanced changes in...

Using 1980-–2000 Census data to study the impact of source country characteristics on married adult immigrants' labor supply assimilation profiles, we find that immigrant women from countries with high female labor supply persistently work more than those from low-female-supply countries....

This paper argues that an important factor in a married woman's decision to enter the labor force is the degree of uncertainty associated with expectations of future wages and (husband's) income, and that high levels of uncertainty during the 1970s may have contributed substantially to the...

Using CPS data to analyze black-white earnings trends, the authors find that black women fared better than men in some respects but in other important respects their experience was similar. On the one hand, over the period as a whole, black women experienced increases in both annual earnings and...