NBER Working Papers by Per-Anders Edin

The paper describes the Swedish wage distribution and how it correlates with worker mobility and plant-specific factors. It is well known that wage inequality has increased in Sweden since the mid-1980s. However, little evidence has so far been available as to whether this development reflects increased dispersion between plants, between individuals in the same plant, or both. We use a new linked employer-employee data set and discover that a trend rise in between-plant wage inequality account for the entire increase in wage dispersion. This pattern, which remains when we control for observable individual human capital characteristics, may reflect increased sorting of workers by skill levels and/or increased scope for rent sharing in local wage negotiations. Our discussion suggests that bo...

Wage inequality in Sweden declined precipitously during the 1960s and the 1970s. There was a sharp reduction in overall wage dispersion and in the relative earnings advantage of highly-educated workers, a marked narrowing of wage differences between men and women, and a trend increase in youth relative wages. There was also a substantial narrowing of wage differentials among workers within broad occupational and educational groups. The trend decline in wage inequality was broken in the 1980s. Wage differentials along several dimensions have widened modestly from the rnid-1980s to the early 1990s. Much of the Swedish discussion has taken it for granted that the pay compression has been driven by the egalitarian ambitions of strong and coordinated trade unions. Our analysis of the Swedish wa...