The Impact of Changes in the Composition of the Labor Force on the Wage Distribution

This dissertation explores the links between human capital accumulation, wage structure, and economic inequality. In particular, I explore how individuals adjust to changes in the economic environment using human capital accumulation decisions.;The first chapter examines the impact of immigration on the U.S. wage distribution and the welfare of native workers. To do so, I develop a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous workers who differ both in their level of skills and in their ability to learn new skills.;Workers accumulate human capital optimally using information about the market price of skill to guide their decisions. I analyze the effect of an unexpected influx of immigrants on the price of skill and hence on earnings, skill accumulation, and educational attainment of native workers.;I find that immigration has a small negative direct effect on earnings but a positive and relatively larger impact indirectly through human capital accumulation and educational attainment. This latter mechanism explains 60% of the variations in earnings caused by immigration.;The second chapter, co-authored with Eduardo Engel, uses an empirical approach to study how changes in access to Chilean tertiary education over the past 30 years affect several measures of economic inequality. We group workers according to their cohort and educational attainment and decompose the variance of log-wages into the sum of the within- and between-group variances. We find that the significant decrease in inequality observed since the mid-1990s is due mainly to a decrease in the between-group variance.