We analyze how relative wage movements among birth cohorts and education groups affected the distribution of household consumption and economic welfare. Our empirical work draws on the best available cross-sectional data sets to construct synthetic panel data on U.S. consumption, labor supply...

We analyze how relative wage movements across birth cohorts and education groups during the 1980s affected the distribution of household consumption. The analysis integrates the labor economics literature on time variation in the wage structure with the consumption insurance literature. In...

When match formation is costly and wage determination is decentralized, privately optimal investments in job and worker quality diverge from socially efficient outcomes. To explore this issue, I consider search equilibrium environments with endogenous quality distributions for jobs and workers....

This paper investigates movements in relative wages and wage inequality across thirteen of the world's major economies. Focusing on wages received by full-time male workers, the investigation uncovers several empirical regularities: (1) Most advanced industrialized economies show increases,...