Women who have first births relatively late in life earn higher wages. This paper offers an explanation of this fact based on a staple life-cycle model of human capital investment and timing of first birth. The model yields conditions (that are plausibly satisfied) under which late childbearers...

This paper documents the substantial decline in the economic position of less-skilled American males that has occurred since the early 1970's. The paper also explores a variety of potential explanations for the widening of earnings differentials between more- and less-educated white males. On...

This paper analyzes changes in U.S. earnings differentials in the 1980s between race, gender, age, and schooling groups. There are four main sets of results to report. First, the economic position of less-educated workers declined relative to the more-educated among almost all demographic...

This paper attempts to measure and explain recent changes in the distributions of family income in Canada and the U.S. using comparable micro-data for the two countries for 1979 and 1987. Three main sets of conclusions are reached. First, the distributions of total family income (pre-tax,...

This paper explores the relationship between technological change and inequality in the U.S. since the late 1960's. The analysis focuses primarily on studying patterns and trends in the dispersion of various distributions of earnings and income during this recent period of rapid technological...

We examine the detailed structure of family income inequality in the United States, Canada, and Australia at various points during the 1980s. In each of these countries we find that income inequality increased among married couple families and that the increases are closely associated with...

Displaced workers with generous periods of advance notice are more likely than their non-notified counterparts to avoid post-displacement unemployment altogether, but once unemployed, they tend to escape from unemployment much more slowly. The authors, using data from the five-year retrospective...

The principal justification for minimum wage legislation has been the claim that it would improve the economic condition of low-wage workers. Most previous analyses of the distributional effects of minimum wages have been based on simulation exercises employing restrictive assumptions that...