The division of labor between and within countries is driven by two fundamental forces, comparative advantage and increasing returns. We set up a simple Ricardian model with a Marshallian input sharing mechanism to study their interplay. The key insight that emerges is that the interaction...

Do migrants shape the dynamic comparative advantage of their sending and receiving countries? To answer this question we study the drivers of knowledge diffusion by looking at the dynamics of the export basket of countries, with particular focus on migration. The fact that knowledge diffusion...

We examine the direct impact of idiosyncratic match quality on entry wages and job mobility using unique data on worker talents matched to job-indicators and individual wages. Tenured workers are clustered in jobs with high job-specific returns to their types of talents. We therefore measure...

We consider the effects of the financial crisis and subsequent recession on world labour markets. It begins by cataloguing the adverse effects on output of the sudden collapse in demand brought about by the financial crisis in what has come to be called the Great Recession. Next we look at the...

We document dramatic rising wages in China for the period 1978-2007 based on multiple sources of aggregate statistics. Although real wages increased seven-fold during the period, growth was uneven across ownership types, industries and regions. Since the late 1990s, the wages of state-owned...

An emerging literature argues that changes in the allocation of workplace "tasks" between capital and labor, and between domestic and foreign workers, has altered the structure of labor demand in industrialized countries and fostered employment polarization – that is, rising employment in the...

Why are females compared to males both more likely to have strong STEM-related performance and less likely to study STEM later on? We exploit random assignment of students to classrooms in Greece to identify the impact of comparative advantage in STEM relative to non-STEM subjects on STEM...

Gender differences in math performance are now small in developed countries and they cannot explain on their own the strong under-representation of women in math-related fields. This latter result is however no longer true once gender differences in reading performance are also taken into...

In this paper we empirically examine differences in search behavior between men and women. We assess hypotheses regarding duration of search, wages and tenure. The hypotheses are derived from two models: the equilibrium search model with discriminatory firms by Black (1995) and an opportunity...