Labour market inequality and the changing life cycle profile of male and female wages

Turning to the parameter estimates in the wage equation, we see that wage gaps of race- ethnicity minority groups tend to be most pronounced in the bottom half of the distribution for both men and women, while the premium to marriage tends to be higher in the bottom half for men, and (slightly) higher in the top half of wages of women. [...] At the bottom of Tables I-IV we present Wald tests of the joint significance of the cohort terms, the interaction terms between time and entry age (R1-R4 in the tables), and both cohort and the R1-R4 terms. [...] The time series decline is largely driven by the relative wage gains in the cohorts of women in the 1940s and 1950s that reduced the level gap at middle working ages and with further progress in later working ages, while the plateauing of the time-series gap after the mid 1990s stems from a stalling of progress across the life cycle in cohorts after the 1950s. [...] Moreover, in Figure VI we see gender wage gap peak earlier in the life cycle through the 1950s cohort and then a sharp reversal to later in the life cycle starting with the 1960s cohorts (except among the college-educated at the 90th percentile where the reversal started with the 1950s cohort). [...] This was perhaps foreshadowed in the time-series Appendix Figure A1 of full-time workers, where similar to the sample overall, there is a sharp decline in the gender wage gap from the 1970s to the mid 1990s, followed by a stalling in the gap, which is more pronounced in the top half of the wage distribution.