This paper presents firm level evidence on the change of non-manual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides offsetting disaggregate forces. First, while technical...

We study the effects ''globalization'' on wage inequality. Our ''global'' economy resembles Rosen (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...

Recent evidence shows that the "home bias puzzle" in international trade may be associated with the mere presence of national borders (McCallum (1995)). In this paper we provide a theoretical framework to explain why borders may matter so much for trade. Our argument is that even between...

Several developed countries are witnessing a trend towards an increasing gap in the earnings between skilled and unskilled workers. Though it is widely recognised that human capital formation programs through education and training should be strengthened in the presence of increasing wage...

This paper presents firm level evidence on the dynamics of nonmanual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides offsetting disaggregate forces. First, while technical...

We introduce incomplete contracts in a model where multinational firms from a certain country ("North") can decide to serve a foreign market ("South") through exports or through horizontal foreign direct investment (FDI). FDI relies on the supply of specialized intermediate inputs that could be...

In this paper we illustrate the possible normative relevance of the links between human capital and financial assets via an example related to growth. Human capital investments occur in a risky environment, in that they are subject to aggregate uncertainty. Agents are heterogenous in their...

This paper provides a cross-country perspective to the firm-level analysis of the relation between foreign ownership and labor demand in host countries. We estimate labor demand equations in eleven European countries using dynamic panel data techniques on samples that permit to distinguish the...

We introduce incomplete outsourcing contracts in an otherwise standard model of MNEs based on the trade-off between proximity and concentration. This has both positive and normative implications. As to the former, incomplete outsourcing contracts can account for the observed emergence of FDIs in...