Wage Inequality of US Truck Drivers

Abstract

Using CPS data for the period 1979–2009, the wage dispersion of truck drivers (and subsets of the truck driving sample) is compared with the trends in wage dispersion of males economy‐wide. We find that truckers' wages experienced a decrease in inequality post‐deregulation, as expected given the literature on regulation's impact on the labor market. We also find that the wage dispersion for truckers is markedly different from males economy‐wide, providing evidence that the wage distribution of truck drivers has been dominated by the changing structure of the occupation post‐deregulation and largely immune to the factors that increased inequality for the aggregate labor market.