TY - JOUR AU - Devroye,Dan AU - Freeman,Richard B. TI - Does Inequality in Skills Explain Inequality in Earnings Across Advanced Countries? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 8140 PY - 2001 Y2 - February 2001 DO - 10.3386/w8140 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8140 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8140.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Richard B. Freeman NBER 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/868-3900 Fax: 617/868-2742 E-Mail: freeman@nber.org AB - The distribution of earnings and the distribution of skills vary widely among advanced countries, with the major English-speaking countries, the US, UK, and Canada, having much greater inequality in both earnings and skills than continental European Union countries. This raises the possibility that cross-country differences in the distribution of skills determine cross-country differences in earnings inequality. Using the International Adult Literacy Survey, we find that skill inequality explains only about 7% of the cross-country difference in inequality. Most striking, the dispersion of earnings in the US is larger in narrowly defined skill groups than is the dispersion of earnings for European workers overall. The bulk of cross-country differences in earnings inequality occur within skill groups, not between them. ER -