Labor Market Inequality and the Changing Life Cycle Profile of Male and Female Wages

We estimate the full distribution of life cycle wages for cohorts of men and women in the United States using a quantile selection model to account for systematic differences in employment by gender and education group. Although common within-group time effects are shown to be a key driver of labor market inequalities across gender, important additional differences by birth cohort emerge with more recent cohorts of women delaying child rearing and, by implication, the onset of child penalties in wages. These cross-cohort differences help account for the stalling of progress in gender wage gaps over the past quarter century. (JEL D15, J13, J16, J24, J31)