This paper surveys major empirical regularities concerning changes in earnings inequality in Europe and the US over the past 25 years. Next, it indicates which of these regularities can be explained within the competitive demand-supply framework of analysis and what is left unexplained. Finally,...

A growing theoretical and empirical literature is concerned with the effects of flexible workplace systems or High Performance Work Organizations (HPWOs) on wages. Existing theoretical literature suggests that these forms of organization should lead to higher inequality across firms, increased...

This paper sheds light on how changes in the organization of work can help to understand increasing wage inequality. We present a theoretical model in which workers with a wider span of competence (higher level of multitasking) earn a wage premium. Since abilities and opportunities to expand the...

We use a comprehensive dataset of French manufacturing firms to study their internal organization. We first divide the employees of each firm into `layers' using occupational categories. Layers are hierarchical in that the typical worker in a higher layer earns more, and the typical firm...

The literature on within-firm organizational change and productivity suggests that firms can make more efficient use of certain technologies if complementary forms of organization are adopted. This issue may be of even greater importance for the case of greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement...

This Paper uses a German employer-employee matched panel dataset to investigate the effect of organizational and technological changes on gross job and worker flows. The empirical results indicate that organizational change is skill-biased because it reduces predominantly net employment growth...

This paper establishes a causal effect of product market competition on various characteristics of organizational design. Using a unique panel dataset on firm hierarchies of large U.S. firms (1986-1999) and a quasi-natural experiment (trade liberalization), we find that increasing competition...

This paper studies technological change in renewable energies, providing empirical evidence on the determinants of innovative activity with a special emphasis on the role of knowledge spillovers. We investigate two major renewable energy technologies wind and solar across a panel of 21 OECD...

We model technological and financial innovation as reflecting the decisions of profit maximizing agents and explore the implications for economic growth. We start with a Schumpeterian endogenous growth model where entrepreneurs earn monopoly profits by inventing better goods and financiers arise...

Can stringent labor laws be efficient? Possibly, if they provide firms with a commitment device to not punish short-run failures and thereby incentivize the pursuit of value-maximizing innovative activities. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that strong labor laws indeed appear to...