After a decade in which wages and employment fell precipitously in low-skill occupations and expanded in high-skill occupations, the shape of U.S. earnings and job growth sharply polarized in the 1990s. Employment shares and relative earnings rose in both low and high-skill jobs, leading to a...

Building on existing studies of national employment systems, we take a multi-dimensional approach to comparative employment relations where the national level remains meaningful but which emphasises within-country dynamics and heterogeneity. Analysing nationally representative workplace surveys...

In recent times the employment effects of technical progress raised much intention. Will recent productivity gains lead to technological unemployment or to a new prosperity? In our paper it is shown formally that under general and standard preconditions the price elasticity of demand on product...

Thorough structural change occurs periodically across world economies. In a parsimonious overlapping generation setup with political economy, we present a novel result: structural change not only exacerbates the rise in inequality but also strengthens the preference for redistribution. Labor...

Two prominent secular trends characterize the transformation of labor markets in industrialized countries in recent decades. First, employment has shifted from manufacturing to services. Second, the share of female employment in total employment has risen sharply. This paper documents a novel...

In this paper we analyse how labour market institutions and technology affect wage determination through rent sharing. To this aim we first extend the theoretical framework of Estevao and Tevlin (2003) to account for heterogeneity of labour (regular and non-regular workers). The predictions of...

This study examines the potential impact of works councils and unions on the deployment of fixed-term contracts and agency temps. We report inter al. that works councils are associated with a higher number of temporary agency workers when demand volatility is high while the opposite holds for...

The interplay between labour institutions and the adoption of automation technologies remains poorly understood. Specifically, there is little evidence on how the nature of industrial relations shapes technological choices at the workplace level. Using a large sample of more than 20000 European...

Income inequality has been lower in periods when trade unionism has been strong. Using observations on wages by occupation, by geography, and by gender in collective bargaining contracts from the 1940s to the 1970s, patterns in movements of wage differentials are revealed. As wages increased,...

The world of work is in constant change. Demographic shifts, technological innovation, institutional reforms and global economic integration affect the way people work. Technological innovations have a major impact on occupations and industries, changing the ways economies in different world...