The evolution of hourly compensation in Canada between 1980 and 2010 /

Université Laval, mathieu.pellerin.2@ulaval.ca 1 Introduction This paper quanti es the contribution of changes in the composition of the workforce to the rise of wage inequality in Canada between 1980 and 2010. [...] The increase of within-group variances is itself driven by the rapid growth of hourly compensation in the top percentiles, as shown in Figure 1. Composition e ects and changes in the returns to various measures of skill play only a small role in the rise of total inequality. [...] The next sub-sections detail the evolution of the hourly wage according to di erent characteristics and quantify the changes that occurred between 1980 and 2010 regarding the composition of the full-time work force. [...] Since wage inequality is much lower among women in the wage structure of 2006, the entry of women in the labour force over the period o sets the impact of rising educational attainments and experience levels on residual inequality. [...] The graphs of the counterfactual percentiles will form two horizontal lines that will bound the graph of the percentile under consideration, since the composition of the workforce is held constant in counterfactual scenarios.