This paper argues that skill-biased technical change has some deficiencies as a hypothesis about the impact of technology on the labor market and that a more nuanced view recently proposed by Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003) is a more accurate description. The difference between the two hypotheses...

There is little doubt that technology has had the most profound effect on altering the tasks that wehumans do in our jobs. Economists have long speculated on how technical change affects boththe absolute demand for labour as a whole and the relative demands for different types of labour.In...

This paper shows, using data from both the US and the UK, that average plant size is larger in denser markets. However, many popular theories of agglomeration - spillovers, cost advantages and improved match quality - predict that establishments should be smaller in cities. The paper proposes a...

Labor's share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network...

We reassess the effect of state and federal minimum wages on U.S. earnings inequality, attending to two issues that appear to bias earlier work: violation of the assumed independence of state wage levels and state wage dispersion, and errors-in-variables that inflate impact estimates via an...

The first contribution of this paper is to use UK monthly firm-level data to show that there is a large amount of transitory volatility in firm-level average earnings from month to month. We conclude that this cannot all be explained away as the consequence of measurement error, composition...