TY - RPRT AU - Fernández-Val, Iván AU - Peracchi, Franco AU - Vuuren, Aico van AU - Vella, Francis TI - Hours Worked and the U.S. Distribution of Real Annual Earnings 1976–2016 PY - 2020/Feb/ PB - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) CY - Bonn T2 - IZA Discussion Paper IS - 13016 UR - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp13016 AB - We examine the impact of annual hours worked on annual earnings by decomposing changes in the real annual earnings distribution into composition, structural and hours effects. We do so via a nonseparable simultaneous model of hours, wages and earnings. We provide identification results and estimators of the objects required for the decompositions. Using the Current Population Survey for the survey years 1976–2016, we find that changes in the level of annual hours of work are important in explaining movements in inequality in female annual earnings. This captures the substantial changes in their employment behavior over this period. The impact of hours on males' earnings inequality operates only through the lower part of the earnings distribution and reflects the sensitivity of these workers' annual hours of work to cyclical factors. KW - decompositions KW - sample selection KW - earnings inequality KW - nonseparable model ER -