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...

The current research emphasis on institutions as key determinants of economic performance, rather than on resources and resource productivity, has uncovered important questions for further research. For example, if institutions are central to economic performance, then what explains observed...

Institutions either promote or constrain economic performance, but which parts of institutions advance or restrict performance, and why do economies sharing similar institutions sometimes perform differently? This paper is a modest attempt at addressing a small part of these questions. It...

Five decades ago, Simon Kuznets expressed an important hypothesis about the relationship between the degree of income inequality within a country and its level of economic development: the Kuznets’s inverted-U hypothesis. The lack of longitudinal data has forced the use of cross-section or...

The causes and consequences of the intergenerational persistence of inequality are a topic of great interest among various fields in economics. However, until now, issues of data availability have restricted a broader and cross-national perspective on the topic. Based on rich sets of harmonized...

Due to scarcity considerations an increase in the supply of college graduates should reduce the premium for this kind of qualification. Therefore it seems quite contradictory that a tremendous educational expansion in the USA is accompanied by rising wage dispersion (overall and between...