Skill-Biased Technical Change and Wage Inequality: The U.S. versus Europe

Abstract

This paper analyzes the effect of the recent technical change on the labor market and explains the observed differences in wage inequality among advanced countries. In particular, we focus on the difference between the wage inequality in the U.S. and continental Europe. By introducing human capital investment into Acemoglu (1999)'s model, we show that ex ante homogeneous economies would have distinct ex post wage inequality. In addition, we show that the differences in tax or education system can explain the difference in wage inequality between the U.S. and Europe.