the technique assumes in particular that the conditional quantile of an individual remains the same when hisher characteristics change since this assumption may well not hold in practice the results of conditional quantile regressions must be interpreted with caution koenker unconditional quantile regressions by contrast allow estimating the effect of a small change in workers characteristics on each quantile of the overall distribution since uqrs allow assessing the impact of a particular variable on overall earnings inequality they are also more suitable than cqrs in the context of this article and are thus used as the baseline method