since many of the factors that are found to be relevant for how labour earnings are distributed among the working population can be influenced by policy makers the article also draws some tentative policy conclusions from the empirical results as far as possible the analysis is based on comparable individual data for this wide set of countries providing a unique countrybycountry assessment of the drivers of earnings inequality the empirical analysis mainly makes use of the unconditional quantile regression technique proposed by firpo eta i this method allows estimating the effect of the potential determinants on all parts of the earnings distribution and is thus better suited to answer questions about the drivers of earnings inequality than standard least squares techniques that only allow estimating effects on mean earnings