Cross-Country Inequality Trends
回顾了美英与欧洲工资不平等差异的两种主流解释，并提出欧洲压缩工资的制度鼓励了提升低技能工人生产率的技术投资，从而减少了技能偏向型技术变革。
I review the two most popular explanations for the differential trends in wage inequality in US/ UK and Europe: that relative supply of skills increased faster in Europe, and that European labour market institutions prevented inequality from increasing. Although these explanations go some way towards accounting for the differential cross-country inequality trends, it also appears that relative demand for skills increased differentially across countries. I develop a simple theory where labour market institutions creating wage compression in Europe also encourage more investment in technologies increasing the productivity of less-skilled workers, implying less skill-biased technical change in Europe than the US. While over the 1980s wage inequality and returns to education increased sharply in the US and the UK, there was less of an increase, or even no change, in continental European economies; see, for example, Freeman and Katz (1995), Nickell and Bell (1996), Katz et al. (1995). Table 1 illustrates these trends by showing an estimate of the education pre-mium and the log differences of the 90th and the 10th percentiles of the wage distribution for a number of countries from the Luxembourg Income Studies