Skill-Biased Technological Change, Organizational Change, and Wage Inequality

We build a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition with moral hazard contracting to examine the interactions among skill-biased technological change (SBTC), organizational changes, and skill premium and within-group wage inequality. While the existing literature finds that the increase in the skilled labor ratio induces SBTC and raises the skill premium, we show that SBTC leads to organizational change toward decentralization by delegating authority within firms, which inuences the reward schedule for delegated skilled managers. This organizational change results in the following: (1) the further increase in the skill premium and (2) the rapid expansion of wage inequality among skilled individuals (between skilled workers and skilled managers). Moreover, we find that there are multiple equilibria where the centralized and decentralized organizational modes simultaneously emerge at the intermediate values of the skilled labor ratio.