This Paper presents firm level evidence on the dynamics 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...

Since changes in trade openness are typically confounded with other factors, it has been difficult to identify the labour market consequences of increased international trade. The advent of the United States Interstate Highway System provides a unique policy experiment, which I use to identify...

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...

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 short paper examines the effect of exporting on within-plant wage distributions in employer-employee data on Mexican manufacturing plants. Using the late-1994 peso devaluation interacted with initial plant size as a source of exogenous variation in exporting and focusing on wages at 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...

International trade theory is a general-equilibrium discipline, yet most of the standard portfolio of research focuses on the production side of general equilibrium. In addition, we do not have a good understanding of the relationship between characteristics of goods in production and...

This paper proposes a new mechanism linking trade and wage inequality in developing countries --- the quality-upgrading mechanism --- and investigates its empirical implications in panel data on Mexican manufacturing plants. In a model with heterogeneous plants and quality-differentiated goods,...

This paper explores the hypothesis that changes in trading patterns and partners of US industries have contributed to skill deepening through defensive, skill-biased innovation. It draws on Thoenig and Verdier's (2003) assertion that, since skill-intensive technologies are less likely to be...

I review briefly the empirical evidence in the trade and wages debate, which overwhelmingly rejects the Heckscher-Ohlin explanation for recent increases in OECD skill premia. I then argue that the same evidence is also difficult to reconcile in general equilibrium with the view that exogenous...