NBER Working Papers by Gary W. Loveman

This paper compares changes in the structure of wages in France, Great Britain, Japan. and the United States over the last twenty years. Wage differentials by education and occupation (skill differentials) narrowed substantially in all four countries in the 1970s. Overall wage inequality and skill differentials expanded dramatically in Great Britain and the United States and moderately in Japan during the 1980s. In contrast, wage inequality did not increase much in France through the mid-1980s. Industrial and occupational shifts favored more-educated workers in all four countries throughout the last twenty years. Reductions in the rate of the growth of the relative supply of college-educated workers in the face of persistent increases in the relative demand for more-skilled labor can expla...