This paper presents a general equilibrium assignment model of workers to tasks with endogenous supply of skills. The model has 2 key features. First, skills are endogenous and multidimensional. Second, two types of assignment occur; workers self-select the type of skills to supply and firms...

In this paper, we study the development and underlying drivers of skill premiums in Germany between 1980 and 2008. We show that the significant increase in the medium to low skill wage premiums since the late 1980s was almost exclusively concentrated among the group of workers aged 30 or below....

As technological advances accelerate and labour demands shift, the ability of workers to reallocate across occupations will be crucial for shaping labour market dynamics, inequality, and effective policy design. In this paper, we develop a tractable equilibrium model of the labour market that...

The informal sector plays an important role in the functioning of labor markets in emerging economies. To characterize better this highly heterogeneous sector, we conduct a distributional analysis of the earnings gap between informal and formal employment in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa,...

The share of low-income countries in global exports nearly tripled between 1990 and 2015, driven largely by the rapid emergence of China as an exporting powerhouse. While research in economics had long acknowledged that trade with lower-income countries could raise income inequality in Europe...

Three fundamental forces have shaped labor markets over the last 50 years: the secular increase in the returns to education, educational upgrading, and the integration of large numbers of women into the workforce. We modify the Katz and Murphy (1992) framework to predict the structure of the...

This paper studies the relationship between changes in occupational employment, occupational wages, and rising overall wage inequality. Using long-running administrative panel data with detailed occupation codes, we first document that in all occupations, entrants and leavers earn lower wages...

Latin American countries have some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. However, earnings inequality significantly changed over the last three decades, increasing during the 1980s and 1990s, declining sharply in the 2000s, and stagnating or even increasing in some countries...

In spite of its predominant economic weight in developing countries, little is known about the informal sector earnings structure compared to that of the formal sector. Taking advantage of the VHLSS dataset in Vietnam, in particular its three wave panel data (2002, 2004, 2006), we assess the...