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U.S. stock market participation has increased remarkably over the second half of the 20th century. Starting from a low of 6% in 1952, stock market participation accelerated throughout the i980s and 1990s and reached 32% in 1989 and 49% in 1998.
Yet today, still half of the households do not own any stocks either direetly or indirectly. These observations raise two questions. First,, why is stock market participation so low? Second, why has it increased over time? These questions are important not only for understanding financial markets, but also for designing fiscal policies and social security systems.' This paper sheds light on these issues.
Wage inequality has increased dramatically in the United States over the last few decades. This change is reflected in movements in both between and within-group inequality. Throughout most of the 1980s, between and within-group inequality increased simultaneously. However, this pattern changed in the late 1980s. While between-group inequality continued to increase, measures of within-group inequality by education group have diverged. Lemieux (2006) documents that within group inequality increased for college graduates and postgraduates, remained constant for workers with high school diplomas and some college education, and decreased for high school dropouts. As we argue below, these patterns of within-group inequality are difficult to explain in standard competitive models of the labor market. However we show that a simple frictional model is able to explain these trends and moreover, is consistent with the movements in between-group inequality.
