The evolution of U.S. earnings inequality: 1961?2002

The goal of this article is to summarize the main trends in the earnings and employment distribution in the United States using data drawn from the March Current Population Surveys covering the period between 1961 and 2002. We show that inequality started to increase for men in 1974, and for women in 1981, and for both genders inequality continued to increase throughout 2002. During the same period the wage premium of college graduates over non-college workers increased substantially and the ratio of college educated workers to non-college workers also increased. These facts support the popular skill-biased technical change (SBTC) hypothesis. However, other facts raise some doubts about the SBTC hypothesis. First, the college wage premium is mainly due to workers with a postgraduate degree, but their increase in the labor force started much earlier than the spectacular rise in their wages. Also there has been no marked change in recent decades in the occupational distribution of workers. However, the earning premium of professional over blue collar workers followed the same trend as the college earning premium. And finally, the most dramatic changes in the labor market took place among women.Income distribution

Labor-market Volatility in Matching Models with Endogenous Separations

The business-cycle behavior of a matching model with endogenous separations is studied in this paper. We show that whether aggregate productivity shocks have a larger effect on the vacancy-unemployment ratio than in a model with exogenous separations depends on whether worker productivity stochastically increases with tenure. The difference in the response is quantitatively small, however. We also show that the cleansing effect introduced by allowing for endogenous separations can help in reconciling the model with observed fluctuations in the unemployment rate, but not with those in the vacancy rate. Copyright The editors of the "Scandinavian Journal of Economics" 2008 .

More on Unemployment and Vacancy Fluctuations

Shimer (2005a) argues that the textbook equilibrium search model of unemployment explains less than 10% of the volatility in U.S. vacancies and unemployment when fluctuations are driven by productivity shocks. His paper as well as other recent work inspired by it are reviewed and extended here. Although there seems to be excessive feedback from the job-finding rate to the wage built into the Nash bargaining mechanism assumed to determine wages in the model, we argue that he and others overemphasize the need for wage rigidity to explain the data on labor-market fluctuations. Indeed, a modified version of the model can explain the magnitude of the empirical relationship between the vacancy-unemployment ratio and labor productivity when wages are the outcome of a strategic bargaining game and when the elasticity of the matching function and the opportunity cost of a match are set at reasonable values. The modified model also explains almost two thirds of the volatility in the ratio relative to that of productivity when separation shocks are taken into account, as well as the strong negative correlation between vacancies and unemployment found in Shimer's data. (Copyright: Elsevier)Labor-market search; Unemployment and vacancies volatility; Job-finding rate; Productivity shocks; Wage rigidity