| Sumario: | The 1940-90 Censuses are used to examine long-run changes in male wage inequality and skill premiums and investigate the extent to which shifts in observable measures of skill supply and demand can account for relative wage fluctuations across decades. A simple supply and demand framework is quite successful in accounting for movements in the education premium but is less successful in explaining changes in overall wage inequality. Although the difference between the 90th and 10th percentiles of the log wage distribution dropped sharply in the 1940s and increased at an accelerating rate in the 1980s, relative demand for the most versus the least skilled workers rose steadily throughout the period. The pace of industrial change and especially the expansion of medium-skilled sectors, such as blue-collar manufacturing, seem to have been inversely related to overall wage inequality growth.
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