The notion of skilled-biased technological change is often held responsible for the recent behavior of the U.S. skill premium, or the ratio between the wages of skilled and unskilled labor. This paper develops a framework for understanding this notion in terms of observable variables and uses...

Wage inequality between education groups in the United States has increased substantially since the early 1980s. The relative number of college-educated workers has also increased dramatically in the postwar period. This paper presents a unified framework where the dynamics of both skill...

In this paper we use micro panel data to examine the effects of oil price shocks on employment and real wages, at the aggregate and industry levels. We also measure differences in the employment and wage responses for workers differentiated on the basis of skill level. We find that oil price...

We incorporate nominal wage contracts and government into a quantitative general equilibrium framework. Thus, our model includes three types of shocks: a fiscal shock, a monetary shock, and a technology shock. We show that it is possible in this type of environment to generate a low correlation...

This paper examines the response of real wages and employment probabilities to nominal shocks using micro-panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men. Both economy-wide and sector-specific responses to nominal shocks are examined. The observed response patterns are inconsistent...

This paper analyses how the wage and employment decisions of females are affected by past workforce participation and hours supplied. Our estimation methods exploit the fact that, when markets are complete, the Lagrange multiplier for an agent’s lifetime budget constraint always enters...

Estimates of interindustry wage differentials are obtained using a fixed-effects estimator on a long panel, the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men (NLS). After controlling for observable worker characteristics, 84 percent of the residual variance of log wages across industries is...

This paper examines the response of sectoral real wages and location probabilities to oil price shocks using U.S. micro-panel data (the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men). The goal is to determine whether the observed response patterns are consistent with so-called “sectoral shift”...

This paper uses micro data to examine differences in the cyclical variability of employment, hours, and wages for skilled and unskilled workers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that, at the aggregate level, skilled and unskilled workers are subject to essentially the same degree of...

In this paper, we construct a parsimonious overlapping-generations model of human capital accumulation and study its quantitative implications for the evolution of the U.S. wage distribution from 1970 to 2000. A key feature of the model is that individuals differ in their ability to accumulate...