This dissertation contains three self-contained chapters. The first chapter documents several changes that occurred in wage distribution in Taiwan between 1978 and 2012. For men, wage inequality narrowed initially, but then started widening. The declining wage inequality occurred evenly across the entire male wage distribution before the 1990s, when the economy was growing rapidly. Since the early 1990s, wage inequality among male workers has been rising, and the growth in inequality has been mainly due to expansion in upper-tail inequality. Around the same time, an increase in the college wage premium for male workers is also observed. Using a hybrid DFL reweighting approach, this study decomposes the changes in wage inequality into three main components: changes in the skill composition of the workforce, returns to skill, and residuals. The results show that for male workers, increases in returns to skill that arise from shifts in demand for skill play an important role in explaining the rising upper-tail wage inequality in the 1990s. By contrast, for female workers, changes in the skill composition of the workforce play an important role in explaining rising upper-tail inequality before the 1990s. The second chapter investigates how children's educational attainment varies by birth order. In the literature, high-income and middle- and low-income countries have been shown to have opposite educational outcomes with regard to birth order. Studies using data from high-income countries usually find that later-born children have an educational disadvantage; in contrast, studies using data from middle- and low-income countries find that later-born children have an educational advantage over earlier-born children. This study, however, finds that birth order-educational attainment patterns in high-income countries and Taiwan share some similarities: in smaller Taiwanese families, both later-born boys and girls have an educational disadvantage compared with their older siblings, a pattern typically found in high-income countries. This birth order pattern in smaller families also contradicts previous findings that later-born children receive more education in Taiwan. The final chapter explores wage behavior over business cycles in Taiwan. The results show that real wages during the Great Recession are procyclical, whereas real wages in the recession of the early 2000s are somewhat acyclical. The finding that real wages are more procyclical in the Great Recession than in the recession of the early 2000s is consistent with that in the U.K. The analysis also finds that the responses of real wages to cyclical fluctuations in the 2000s are similar among gender, education, and age groups.
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