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Changes in wage inequality have long been a concern of labor economists and public policymakers. When the wage pre-mium for college graduates fell during the first half of the 1970's, many researchers blamed the decline on the increase in the relative supply of college graduates. When the college wage premium increased dramatically during the 1980's, researchers offered a variety of explanations, such as skill-biased technological change and the internationalization of the US economy. In this paper, we use time-series analysis to evaluate the most common explanations given for the trends in wage inequality. Using cointegration techniques, we evaluate the link between the trends in the candidate explanatory variables and wage inequality. We show that the only variable that consistently shares the same long-run trend with our wage-inequality series is the durablegoods trade deficit as a percentage of GDP …