We investigate the impact of trade liberalization on wages and the returns to education in Brazil. Our pseudo-panel estimates of the returns are significantly lower than OLS estimates, signifying omitted ability bias in traditional cross-section estimated returns in developing countries. Trade...

Using a method for measuring job skills derived from survey data on detailed work activities, we show that between 1997 and 2001 there was a growth in Britain in the utilisation of computing skills, literacy, numeracy, technical know-how, high-level communication skills, planning skills, client...

We assess the stability of the wage structure in an economy experiencing substantial economic changes. We find that the structure of inter-industry wage differentials remained remarkably stable in Brazil in the face of major shocks.

Recent theoretical developments relating to investment under uncertainty have highlighted the importance of irreversibility for the timing of investment expenditures and their expected returns. This has subsequently stimulated a growing empirical literature which examines uncertainty and...

This paper focuses on the determinants of aggregate investment spending in the UK for the industrial and commercial company (ICC) sector. It complements recent work by Cuthbertson and Gasparro (1995), who study an augmented Tobin's q model of investment in the manufacturing sector. Important...

There are two findings that are conspicuous in almost all studies of individual wage determination. First, standard cross-section wage equations rarely account for more than half of the total variance in earnings between individuals. Second, there are large and persistent inter-industry wage...

The empirical literature on the impact of unions on wages has stressed two major conclusions. Firstly, unionised workers earn a wage premium when compared to comparable nonunionised workers. Secondly, the dispersion of wages within the union sector is lower than in the nonunion sector. We...

One of the established findings in the literature on inter-industry wage differentials is the long-term stability of the wage structure. In this paper, we examine how market-oriented and other economic reforms undertaken by an industrialising country affect the dispersion and structure of wages....

This paper investigates the impact of market-oriented economic reforms on union behaviour in Brazil. Previous work shows that openness, deregulation and similar measures constrain union power. In contrast, our results show that insider power has increased in the more competitive environment...

This paper presents a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of trade liberalization on the labor markets of developing countries. We discuss models which seek to explain the empirical finding that openness has increased wage inequality in several developing countries.