Labor Economics II, MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
77 Massachusetts Avenue,
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307,

Course Description,
This is the second of a two-part sequence of courses in labor economics. The course sequence is also open to qualified students in related fields and classes may be taken individually or out of sequence. This part of the sequence is principally concerned with issues relating to the determinants of the wage and salary distribution. The first half is organized around topics in wage determination, which are of particular interest for current research and policy and culminates with a focus on recent debates about the increasing dispersion of wage and salary income. The second half of the course is focused on labor market institutions and technological changes, and relates the debate about the income distribution to other major changes in the structure and texture of advanced industrial societies which have accompanied the widening dispersion of income. The emphasis is on the United States and other advanced industrial countries, with some discussion of the relevance of the theory and analysis to developing economies.