Publisher's Synopsis
Beginning in the 1980s, average wages no longer signaled how well most U.S. workers were faring. Wage patterns, particularly those reflecting education, were remarkably uneven and heralded new and dramatic shifts. Strong increases in real wages for most workers have almost hidden the low wages of other workers.;The authors focus on changes in the economic returns to schooling as a major source of increased dispersion in wages and earnings. They appraise popular explanations such as the shift from manufacturing to services, the state of international trade, and minimum wage policy. They examine male-female and black-white differences and the effects of achievement and test scores, of the quality of schooling, of area of concentration, and of rapid technological changes in labor market demands. Highly documented, with almost fifty tables and more than thirty figures, this study also considers the actual and possible adaptions of the labor market to the relative wage structure.
