Structural demand shifts and potential labor supply responses in the new century

David Autor ()

No 52 in Monograph from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Abstract: It is widely recognized that inequality of labor market earnings in the United States grew dramatically in recent decades. Over the course of more than three decades, wage growth was weak to nonexistent at the bottom of the distribution, strong at the top of the distribution, and modest at the middle. While real hourly earnings of workers in the bottom 30 percent of the earnings distribution rose by no more than 10 percentage points, earnings of workers at the 90th percentile rose by more than 40 percentage points. What is much less widely known, however, is that this smooth, monotone growth of wage inequality is a feature of a specific time period--and that this time period has passed.

Keywords: Labor supply; Wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: Written 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Published in Labor supply in the new century

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/conf/conf52/conf52d.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedbmo:2007sdsaplsritn

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this book

More books in Monograph from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Diane Rosenberger ().