TY - JOUR
AU - Margo, Robert, A.
AB - Abstract The era of wage stretching has been a current focus, but we direct attention here to a decade of extraordinary wage compression—the 1940s. Wages narrowed by education, job experience, and occupation, and compression occurred within cells. The 90–10 differential in the log of wages for men was 1.45 in 1940 but 1.06 in 1950. By the late 1980s it returned to its 1940 level, thus restoring a dispersion of 50 years ago. World War II and the National War Labor Board share some credit for the Great Compression, but much was due to an increased demand for unskilled labor when educated labor was greatly expanding. * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the NBER Conference on “Changes in the Structure of Wages,” Cambridge, MA, August 1990. Comments from Brad De Long, Stanley Engerman, Richard Freeman, Lawrence Katz, Jeffrey Williamson, NBER conference participants, and seminar participants at the Harvard Labor Workshop and the Research Triangle Economic History Workshop are all gratefully acknowledged. We especially acknowledge insights provided by John T. Dunlop on the inner workings of the National War Labor Board. We thank Boris Simkovich for his careful and diligent research assistance. This content is only available as a PDF. © 1992 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
TI - The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century
JF - The Quarterly Journal of Economics
DO - 10.2307/2118322
DA - 1992-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-great-compression-the-wage-structure-in-the-united-states-at-mid-3D18JwbyrG
SP - 1
EP - 34
VL - 107
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -