The paper investigates the relationship between offshoring, wages, and the ease with which individuals' tasks can be offshored. Our analysis relates to recent theoretical contributions arguing that there is only a loose relationship between the suitability of a task for offshoring and the...

The U.K. skill premium fell from the 1950s to the late 1970s and then rose very sharply. This paper examines the contributions to these relative wage movements of international trade and technical change. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth....

While environmental and labour issues are not new to the GATT, nor to other trade policy fora, they are likely to have a more prominent role in trade policy discussions in the years ahead for the newly formed World Trade Organization (WTO). Many developing countries perceive the entwining of...

This paper analyses the impact of cost competitiveness and technology on export performance using a very rich panel dataset of 12 manufacturing industries in 14 OECD countries for the period between 1970 and 1992. Consistent with standard models, we find that changes in relative unit labour...

This paper examines whether the sector bias of skill-biased technical change (SBTC) explains changing skill premia within countries in recent decades. First, using a two-factor, two-sector, two-country model we demonstrate that in many cases it is the sector bias of SBTC that determines SBTC’s...

Since the mid-1980s a substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services. Much of this is inspired by the WTO and regional trade agreements. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberalization. The literature touches on...

The practice of sourcing service inputs from overseas suppliers has been growing in response to new technologies. This paper estimates the effects of offshoring on productivity in US manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2000, using instrumental variables estimation to address the potential...

In the "size of stakes" view quantitatively formalized in Gabaix and Landier (2008), CEO compensation is determined in a competitive talent market, and re flects the size of firms affected by talent. This paper offers empirical update on this view. The years 2004-2011, which include the recent...

Decomposing wages into worker and firm wage components, we find that firm-fixed components (firm rents) are sizeable parts of workers' wages. If workers can only imperfectly observe the extent of firm rents in their wages, they might be mislead about the overall wage distribution. Such...

This paper estimates average and marginal returns to schooling in Indonesia using a non-parametric selection model. Identification of the model is given by exogenous geographic variation in access to upper secondary schools. We find that the return to upper secondary schooling varies widely...