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The gender earnings gap is an expanding statistic over the lifecycle. We use the LEHD Census 2000 to understand the roles of industry, occupation, and establishment 14 years after leaving school. The gap for college graduates 26 to 39 years old expands by 34 log points, most occurring in the first 7 years. About 44 percent is due to disproportionate shifts by men into higher-earning positions, industries, and firms and about 56 percent to differential advances by gender within firms. Widening is greater for married individuals and for those in certain sectors. Non-college graduates experience less widening but with similar patterns.

The small open economies in Scandinavia have for long periods had high work effort, small wage differentials, high productivity, and a generous welfare state. To understand how this might be an economic and political equilibrium we combine models of collective wage bargaining, creative job destruction, and welfare spending. The two-tier system of wage bargaining provides microeconomic efficiency and wage compression. Combined with a vintage approach to the process of creative destruction we show how wage compression fuels investments, enhances average productivity and increases the mean wage by allocating more of the work force to the most modern activities. Finally, we show how the political support of welfare spending is fueled by both a higher mean wage and a lower wage dispersion.

This paper analyzes the role of establishments in the upward trend in dispersion of earnings that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of ln earnings among individuals into the part due to changes in earnings among establishments and the part due to changes in earnings within-establishments. The main finding is that much of the 1970s-2010s increase in earnings inequality results from increased dispersion of the earnings among the establishments where individuals work. Our results direct attention to the role of establishment-level pay setting and economic adjustments in earnings inequality.

Failure to account for differences between immigrants and natives in their responsiveness to changes in macroeconomic conditions may bias estimates of assimilation effects on immigrant earnings. Using Norwegian register data from 1980 to 1996, we first establish that earnings of immigrants from non‐OECD countries exhibit greater sensitivity to local unemployment than do earnings of natives. The empirical analysis further reveals that standard methods of estimation—which fail to consider differential immigrant and native responsiveness—understate earnings growth and overstate cohort differentials among non‐OECD immigrants. These biases are attributable to trends in macroeconomic conditions over the sample period.

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We exploit changes in tax subsidies for union members in Norway to identify the effects of changes in firm-level union density on productivity and wages. Increased deductions in taxable income for union members led to higher membership rates and contributed to a lower decline in union membership rates over time in Norway. Accounting for selection effects and the potential endogeneity of unionization, the results show that increasing union density at the firm level leads to a substantial increase in both productivity and wages. The wage effect is larger in more productive firms, consistent with rent-sharing models.