Rising Wage Inequality: The Role of Composition and Prices
David H. Autor, Lawrence F. Katz, Melissa Kearney
,
NBER Working Paper No. 11628
September
2005
Abstract
During the early 1980s, earnings inequality in the U.S. labor market rose relatively uniformly throughout the wage distribution. But this uniformity gave way to a significant divergence starting in 1987, with upper-tail (90/50) inequality rising steadily and lower tail (50/10) inequality either flattening or compressing for the next 16 years (1987 to 2003).