Published:
Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, February 1999
Published in:NBER working paper series ; no. w6978
Extent:
1 Online-Ressource
Language:
English
DOI:
10.3386/w6978
Identifier:
Reproduction note:
Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
Origination:
Footnote:
Mode of access: World Wide Web
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files
Description:
The U.K. skill premium fell from the 1950s to the late 1970s and then rose very sharply. This paper examines the contributions to these relative wage movements of international trade and technical change. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth. Then we relate price and TFP changes to a set of underlying factors. Among a number of results, we find that changes in prices, not TFP, were the major force behind the rise in inequality in the 1980s. We also find that although increased trade pressure has raised technical change, its effect on wage inequality was not quantitatively significant