TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bound,John
AU  - Johnson,George E.
TI  - Changes in the Structure of Wages During the 1980's:  An Evaluation     of Alternative Explanations
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 2983
PY  - 1989
Y2  - May 1989
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2983
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2983.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
John Bound
Department of Economics
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220
Tel: 734/998-7149
Fax: 734/998-7415
E-Mail: jbound@umich.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 1988-11-01
AB  - Between 1979 and 1987 there were three significant changes in the wage structure in the United States. the pecuniary returns to schooling increased by about a third; the wages of older relative to younger workers with relatively low education increased to some extent; and the wages of women relative to men rose by almost ten percent. It is important for policy purposes to know why these changes occurred and whether they are temporary or permanent. The paper investigates several alternative explanations of these wage structure phenomena, including the most popular ones that their principal causes were shifts in the structure of product demand, skilled-labor saving technological change, and changes in the incidence and level of rents received by lower skilled workers. our reading of the evidence suggests that the major cause of the dramatic movements in the wage structure during the 1980's may have been some combination of changes in both production technology and the average relative nonobserved quality of different labor groups.
ER  -