From Plato and Marx to Piketty’s recent ‘Capital in the 21st Century’, scholars have always been worried about growing inequality. Even though most studies focus on the vicious consequences of rising economic inequality, the recent experience is more perplexing, as inequality has not increased in all dimensions. In particular, over the past four decades increasing U.S. wage inequality within gender has coincided with narrowing inequality between genders, while at the same time access to higher education has become more equal. Theodore Koutmeridis provides an explanation for the combination of these seemingly contradictory facts. He shows that equality of educational opportunity in the US has decreased wage inequality between genders, while at the same time it has increased wage inequality within gender, by boosting the education and experience wage premium.
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