I have a new paper that is now online. It is published by the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization and is co-authored with my old friends (more than a decade-long friendship) Maripier Isabelle and Julien Gagnon. Link is here and abstract is here:
Wage gaps between various groups within economies are common and policy solutions to attenuate them can have different distributional effects within groups. We propose a model to think about how, when labour is relatively immobile but capital isn’t, an economy with initial wage gaps between different groups can transition toward greater equality. We apply this framework to the French-English linguistic wage gap in Quebec (Canada) between 1970 and 2000 by looking at birth cohorts from 1910 to 1970. Our findings are consistent with our model: the closing of the wage gap was caused by a change, during the 1940s in compulsory schooling which shocked the initial equilibrium and led to cohort-specific dynamics.
There is also an op-ed I wrote for the American Institute for Economic Research summarizing the importance of this paper.
Vincent Geloso 