This Paper describes the changes in the composition of the labour force in the last 35 years and quantifies the substitution of low education / high experience workers by low experience / high education workers by using US and French microdata. The consequences of this substitution on the wage...

This paper offers an alternative theory for the increase in unemployment and wage inequality experienced in the United States over the past two decades. In my model firms decide the composition of jobs and then match with skilled and unskilled workers. The demand for skills is endogenous and an...

We study the effect of 'globalization' on wage inequality. Our 'global' economy resembles Rosen's (1981) 'Superstars' economy, where a) innovations in production and communication technologies enable suppliers to reach a larger mass of consumers and to improve the (perceived) quality of their...

We compare the trade and labour approaches to wage inequality. We first look at the theoretical differences, stressing the different roles ascribed to sector and factor bias, labour supply and the theory of technical change in trade models with endogenous prices. We then briefly review some of...

This paper analyzes the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. We find that a substantial part of the growth in inequality, and essentially all the growth in inequality in the bottom end, is due to...

This Paper provides an interpretation for the recent rise in residual wage inequality which is consistent with the empirical observation that a sizeable part of this increase has a transitory nature, a feature that eludes standard models based on ex-ante heterogeneity in ability. In the model an...

This paper considers an economy where skilled and unskilled workers use different technologies. The rate of improvement of each technology is determined by a profit-maximizing R&D sector. When there is a high proportion of skilled workers in the labour-force, the market for skill-complementary...

What demand-side and institutional factors raised the skilled wage premium over the 1980s in UK manufacturing? Using a panel of 80 industries for 1980–89 we find that: (i) the average skill premium rose by around 13 percentage points; (ii) computer introduction explains around 50% of this rise;...

This paper develops a growth model in which the endogenous evolution of technological progress and wage inequality is consistent with the observed pattern in the United States and several European economies in the last two centuries. The model accounts for: a) the rise in wage inequality between...

We use two UK panel data sets to investigate skill-upgrading in the United Kingdom and how it has been affected by computerization. Census data reveals that most aggregate skill-upgrading is explained by within-firm rises in skill composition. Such upgrading is significantly related to...