Using the IAB Employment Sample (IABS) covering 1980-2001 we investigate what impact the fall of the Iron Curtain has had on the skill structure of employment and wages in the western German districts neighbouring the Czech Republic. The introduction of free trade in this region, which has one...

Although theory predicts that international trade will decrease the relative demand for skilled workers in relatively skill-deficit countries, in recent decades many developing countries have experienced rising wage premiums for skilled workers. We examines this puzzle by quantifying the...

This paper focuses on the causes of increased wage inequality in OECD countries in recent years and its decomposition into the component factors of trade surges in low wage products and technological change that has preoccupied the trade and wages literature. It argues that the length of...

At the turn of the millennium three frequently cited potential causes of new challenges for wage policy in Germany are revisited in this study: skilled- biased technological progress, the increasing international integration of labor and product markets, and the monetary integration of the EMU....

During the last two decades, the labour demand structure in Germany has experienced a decrease in the demand for the low skilled. Possible explanations for this trend are investigated in this study for West Germany (1994- 1997) using a unique linked employer-employee panel data set for Germany....

Hardly noticed in Western Europe the fall of the Iron Curtain had also ef-fects on the regional structures of the labour markets in the Central and Eastern Euro-pean Countries (CEEC). I analyse whether during the undoubtedly increasing integration of markets the Czech border region close to the...

Our paper investigates the link between international outsourcing and wages utilizing a large household panel and combining it with industry level information on industries' outsourcing activities from input-output tables. This approach avoids problems such as aggregation bias, potential...

This study aims at examining the impact of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) on human development and poverty reduction in India. It identifies three channels through which SEZs address these issues: employment generation, skill formation (human capital development), and technology and knowledge...

We use linked employer-employee data from Italy to explore the relationship between exports and wages. Our empirical strategy exploits the 1992 devaluation of the Italian Lira, which represented a large and unforeseen shock to Italian firms' incentives to export. The results indicate that the...

This paper investigates the effects of services offshoring on wages using individual level data combined with industry information on offshoring. Our results show that services ofsshoring affects the real wage of low and medium skilled individuals negatively. By contrast, skilled workers benefit...