Companies are increasingly asked to provide innovative solutions to deep-seated problems of human misery, even as economic theory instructs managers to focus on maximizing their shareholders' wealt

Misery Loves Companies: Rethinking Social Initiatives by Business:

This chapter presents a framework for understanding changes in the wage structure and overall earnings inequality. The framework emphasizes the role of supply and demand factors and the interaction of market forces and labor market institutions. Recent changes in the US wage structure are analyzed in detail to highlight crucial measurement issues that arise in studying wage structure changes and to illustrate the operation of the supply-demand-institution framework. The roles of skill-biased technological change, globalization forces, changes in demographics and relative skill supplies, industry labor rents, unions, and the minimum wage in the evolution of the US wage structure are examined. Recent wage structure changes are placed in a longer-term historical perspective, and differences and similarities in wage structure changes among OECD nations are assessed. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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Changes in the Wage Structure and Earnings Inequality

A recent “revisionist” literature characterizes the pronounced rise in U.S. wage inequality since 1980 as an “episodic” event of the first half of the 1980s driven by nonmarket factors (particularly a falling real minimum wage) and concludes that continued increases in wage inequality since the late 1980s substantially reflect the mechanical confounding effects of changes in labor force composition. Analyzing data from the Current Population Survey for 1963 to 2005, we find limited support for these claims. The slowing of the growth of overall wage inequality in the 1990s hides a divergence in the paths of upper-tail (90/50) inequality—which has increased steadily since 1980, even adjusting for changes in labor force composition—and lower-tail (50/10) inequality, which rose sharply in the first half of the 1980s and plateaued or contracted thereafter. Fluctuations in the real minimum wage are not a plausible explanation for these trends since the bulk of inequality growth occurs above the median ...

Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Revising the Revisionists

This paper examines the effect of skill-biased technological change as measured by computerization on the recent widening of U. S. educational wage differentials. An analysis of aggregate changes in the relative supplies and wages of workers by education from 1940 to 1996 indicates strong and persistent growth in relative demand favoring college graduates. Rapid skill upgrading within detailed industries accounts for most of the growth in the relative demand for college workers, particularly since 1970. Analyses of four data sets indicate that the rate of skill upgrading has been greater in more computer-intensive industries.

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Computing Inequality: Have Computers Changed the Labor Market?

The recent rise in wage inequality is usually attributed to skill‐biased technical change (SBTC), associated with new computer technologies. We review the evidence for this hypothesis, focusing on the implications of SBTC for overall wage inequality and for changes in wage differentials between groups. A key problem for the SBTC hypothesis is that wage inequality stabilized in the 1990s despite continuing advances in computer technology; SBTC also fails to explain the evolution of other dimensions of wage inequality, including the gender and racial wage gaps and the age gradient in the return to education.

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Skill‐Biased Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality: Some Problems and Puzzles

"A comprehensive statistical portrait of the standard of living of working AmericansA very interesting and useful book It presents a wealth of statistical information in a very accessible manner" -- Journal of Economic Issues

The State of Working America

incomes and wages has now raged for at least two decades. In this paper, we will make four arguments. First, the increase in the incomes and we will make four arguments. First, the increase in the incomes and wages of the top 1 percent over the last three decades should be interpreted wages of the top 1 percent over the last three decades should be interpreted as driven largely by the creation and/or redistribution of economic rents, and as driven largely by the creation and/or redistribution of economic rents, and not simply as the outcome of well-functioning competitive markets rewarding not simply as the outcome of well-functioning competitive markets rewarding skills or productivity based on marginal differences. This rise in rents accruing skills or productivity based on marginal differences. This rise in rents accruing to the top 1 percent could be the result of increased to the top 1 percent could be the result of increased opportunities for rentfor rent

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.27.3.57

The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals as Evidence of Rents in Top 1 Percent Incomes

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The State of Working America, 12th Edition

Wage stagnation experienced by the vast majority of American workers has emerged as a central issue in economic policy debates, with candidates and leaders of both parties noting its importance. This is a welcome development because it means that economic inequality has become a focus of attention and that policymakers are seeing the connection between wage stagnation and inequality. Put simply, wage stagnation is how the rise in inequality has damaged the vast majority of American workers.

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Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Typical Worker's Pay: Why It Matters and Why It's Real

www.CornellPress.Cornell.edU In Failure by Design, the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens takes a step back from the acclaimed State of Working America series, building on its wealth of data to relate a compelling narrative of the U.S. economy’s struggle to emerge from the Great Recession of 2008. Bivens explains the causes and impact on working Americans of the most catastrophic economic policy failure since the 1920s.

Josh Bivens

Papers

The State of Working America

The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals as Evidence of Rents in Top 1 Percent Incomes

The State of Working America, 12th Edition

Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Typical Worker's Pay: Why It Matters and Why It's Real

Failure by Design: The Story behind America's Broken Economy