The gender wage gap in East Germany has narrowed by 10 percentage points in transition, but women have experienced much more severe employment difficulties than men. Using the German Socio‐Economic Panel for 1990–94, I show that on balance women have lost relative to men. Almost half the relative wage gain is due to exits from employment of the low skilled, who are disproportionately women. The female employment decline is not primarily voluntary: more than half the gender gap in the hazard rate from employment reflects a general fall in demand for low‐skilled workers. Reduced child care plays no role.

In West Germany during the 1980s, law changes cut the level of unemployment compensation for the unemployed without children and extended the duration of unemployment insurance for unemployed aged over 41. Analysis of these changes using the German Socioeconomic Panel shows that transitions from unemployment for those under 49 were particularly responsive to extensions of unemployment insurance. The implied elasticity for escapes of men to employment is similar to estimates for men in the United States, suggesting that differences in the potential duration of unemployment insurance only partially explain the difference in spell lengths between Germany and the United States.

Using the American Community Surveys, I examine the wages of immigrant computer and engineering workers. Immigrants’ higher education gives them a wage advantage over natives, an advantage larger for computer than for engineering workers, and larger in occupation-based samples than in education-based samples. Among holders of engineering degrees, immigrants earn less than natives, penalized by a high return to English proficiency. The results suggest that imperfect English may reduce their occupational advancement, or an unobserved factor may reduce both occupational advancement and the incentive to perfect English. In all samples, top immigrants from the highest-income countries far outearn top natives.

This paper examines the mobility of individuals through the wage and earnings distributions, using 1979-1991 data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Lifetime wages will be more equally distributed than wages from any single year if individuals change position in the wage distribution over time. The results suggest that mobility is predominantly within group mobility, reducing wage inequality by 12%-26% over a four-year horizon. A detailed examination of within-group mobility, using year-to-year estimates of transition probabilities among quintiles of the distribution, reveals similar general patterns across all skill groups: mobility declined significantly over the years, especially at the lower end of the wage and earnings distributions.