This paper investigates whether the contribution of the declining share of wages in national income to the upswing in profitability between 1982 and 1997 in the United States was aided by the growing incorporation of women into employment. The analysis finds that women helped moderate the decline in the aggregate wage share. The reduction in gender pay disparity overwhelmed the negative effect of women's growing share of market work on the wage share. However, in (one-digit) sectors where wage shares fell, women did not contribute to restraining the fall, indicating that the aggregate outcome was the net result of distinct sectoral trends in women's employment conditions. We argue that the perverse process of labor productivity falling faster than the real wage in the service sector may have played a key role in shaping the aggregate outcome. The post-1997 trends in the US are discussed in a postscript.Profitability, feminization of the labor force, gender wage gap,

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This article explores how inequities in public K‐12 school spending impact the distribution of economic well‐being across American households with public school students in 1989 and 2000. Adapting concepts from the public finance literature, I explore the impact of school spending on the vertical and horizontal equity and its impact relative to other types of public spending on social programs and taxation. Conventionally, vertical equity refers to the size of the income gaps between households. Horizontal equity refers to the ranking of households along the income distribution with any change in ranks producing horizontal inequity. My main findings show that school spending, when converted into a component of income, served to reduce extended‐income inequality through improvements in vertical equity without the discriminatory implications of exacerbating horizontal inequity across households. Additionally, this impact was at least as large as that of spending on other social programs. This finding bolsters standard arguments for equity and progressivity of school finance across students.

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