A general equilibrium search framework is used to examine the role of gender differences in labor market behavior patterns (e.g., quit rates for personal reasons) in determining gender wage differentials. For samples of high school and college graduates from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), these behavioral patterns are found to be significantly different across the sexes and account for 20%–30% of the wage differentials. In particular, they play a key role in explaining the male‐female wage differential that remains after controlling for the gender composition across occupations.

Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data on tenure and wages, this article analyzes the extent to which the level of job mismatching varies over the business cycle and how it is dealt with by the labor market. I find significant cyclical variation in job match quality and an internalization of the variation by the labor market through wages. Mismatching occurs more during recessions but is primarily captured in starting wages. The evidence suggests the cyclical phenomenon is one of general mismatching rather than an increased number of stopgap jobs during recessions.

In this paper we study the evolution of lifetime labour income inequality by constructing present value life cycle measures that incorporate both earnings and employment risk. We find that, even though lifetime income inequality is 40% less than earnings inequality, the total increase in lifetime income inequality over the past 20 years is the same as earnings inequality. While the total increase is the same, the pathways there differ with earnings inequality experiencing a steady increase and lifetime income inequality increasing in spurts particularly in the latter half of the 1990s. Finally, we find the changes in lifetime income inequality are primarily driven by changes in earnings mobility and changes in the earnings distribution itself, changes in employment risk and the composition of the sample, such as the shift toward attaining more education and the ageing population, do not play a large role.

Separate identification of the price and quantity of human capital has important implications for understanding key issues in economics. Price and quantity series are derived for four education levels. The price series are highly correlated and they exhibit a strong secular trend. Three resulting implications are explored: the rising college premium is found to be driven more by relative quantity than relative price changes, life-cycle wage profiles are readily interpretable as reflecting optimal human capital investment paths using the estimated price series, and adjusting the labor input for quality increases dramatically reduces the contribution of MFP to growth.

In the last three decades, Canada and the United States showed different paths in per capita gross domestic product growth, skill premiums, and inequality. Worker quality and price differences both play a role but are difficult to distinguish. Human capital prices and quantities are estimated using methods we developed previously. In the United States, there was faster growth and a much more rapid rise in skill premia and inequality. This was primarily due to different paths for the relative price paid to rent high-skilled human capital in the two countries, rather than differences in relative quantities.