How skills acquired in vocational education and training (VET) affect wages and employment is not clear. We develop and estimate a search and matching model for workers with a VET degree. Workers differ in interpersonal, cognitive and manual skills, while firms require and value different...

This paper develops a general-equilibrium model of skill-biased technological change that approximates the observed shifts in the shares of wage and non-wage income going to the top decile of U.S. households since 1980. Under realistic assumptions, we find that all agents can benefit from the...

We introduce permanently-shifting income shares into a standard growth model with two types of agents. Capital owners represent the top quintile of U.S. households while workers represent the remainder. Our tractable model allows us to exactly replicate the observed U.S. time paths of the top...

With the ensuing immigration reform in the US, the paper shows that targeted skilled immigration into the R&D sector that helps low-skilled labor is conducive for controlling inequality and raising wage. Skilled talent-led innovation could have spillover benefits for the unskilled sector while...

The catchword ‘green skills' has been common parlance in policy circles for a while, yet there is little systematic empirical research to guide public intervention for meeting the demand for skills that will be needed to operate and develop green technology. The present paper proposes a...

This paper studies the labor market impact of documented and undocumented immigration in a model with search frictions and non-random hiring. Since they accept lower wages, firms obtain a higher match surplus from hiring immigrants rather than natives. Therefore, immigration results in the...

Using administrative employee-firm-level data on the entire private sector from 1994 to 2007, we show that the labor market in France has polarized: employment shares of high and low wage occupations have grown, while middle wage occupations have shrunk. During the same period, the share of...

Employees of globalized firms face a riskier menu of labor market outcomes. They face a more uncertain stream of earnings and riskier employment prospects. However, they may also have stronger incentives to train and upgrade their skills and/or may benefit from more rapid careers. Hence, the...

The growing finance wage premium is related to a modest net reallocation of skilled workers from non-finance sectors into finance in a broad sample of 24 countries over 35 years. The reallocation is higher when the finance wage premium grows faster than the contribution of the financial sector...

In this paper we conduct a counterfactual analysis and estimate the quantitative importance of demand and supply effects on wage inequality in Germany using a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Auerbach-Kotlikoff (1987) type. Specifically, the methodological contribution...