IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/nbr/nberch/15286.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Can the Great Compression Be Explained by Wartime Wage Controls?

In: The Economic Impacts of World War II

Author

Listed:
  • Chris Vickers
  • Nicolas L. Ziebarth

Abstract

The wage controls of the National War Labor Board (NWLB) have been credited with contributing to the decline in income inequality from 1940 to 1950 that occurred along many different dimensions including across regions and occupations. We calculate an upper bound for the effect of the NWLB during this decade by assuming the controls were maximally binding. At the upper bound, the controls could explain an important fraction of cross-region convergence, but they likely had little effect on inequality between occupations. Moreover, because of sorting by race and education into occupations, the controls cannot explain much of the narrowing of the educational skill premium nor the racial gap. We conclude that the controls are not a “one size fits all” explanation for the Great Compression.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Chris Vickers & Nicolas L. Ziebarth, 2024. "Can the Great Compression Be Explained by Wartime Wage Controls?," NBER Chapters, in: The Economic Impacts of World War II, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberch:15286
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lleras-Muney, Adriana & Morgan, Tommy & Price, Joseph & Wygal, William, 2025. "The effect of World War II spending and army service on the lifespan of the Black population," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 97(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • N42 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - U.S.; Canada: 1913-
    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberch:15286. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.