Standard neo-classical trade theory predicts that trade liberalisation should cause a fall in wage inequality in developing countries through a decrease in the relative demand for skilled labour. Recent studies of a number of developing countries, however, find evidence to the contrary. Using a...

This paper re-examines the trade-based explanation of increased wage inequality in developed countries by focusing on international outsourcing. It is the first detailed study to address the effects of outsourcing on labour markets in the UK. In a recent paper, Feenstra and Hanson (1996)...

We investigate the impact of offshoring on individual level wages and unemployment probabilities and pay particular attention to the question of whether workers on temporary contracts are affected differently than workers on permanent contracts. Data are taken from the German Socio-Economic...

Earning an income is probably the best way of avoiding poverty and social exclusion, hence the recent trend of promoting employment through in-work transfers in OECD countries. Yet, the relative consensus on the need for ?making work pay? policies is muddied by a number of concerns relative to...

The literature on household behavior contains hardly any empirical research on the withinhousehold distributional effect of tax-benefit policies. We simulate this effect in the framework of a collective model of labor supply when shifting from a joint to an individual taxation system in France....

When labor markets are imperfectly competitive, firms may be willing to finance general training if the wage structure is compressed, that is, if the increase of productivity after training is greater than the increase in pay. We propose a novel way of testing this proposition, which exploits...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of a tax policy change on social welfare by using jointly a collective model of household labor supply and a microsimulation program of the French taxbenefit system. The collective approach allows studying the intrahousehold distribution so that for the first...

Discrete-choice models provide a simple way of representing utility-maximizing labor supply decisions in the presence of highly nonlinear and possibly non-convex budget constraints. Thus, it is not surprising that they are so extensively used for ex-ante evaluation of taxbenefit reforms. The...

This paper investigates the effects of the takeover of a domestic establishment by foreign owners on the domestic target?s development of wages for skilled and unskilled workers. We pay particular attention to identifying the causal effect, using a propensity score matching approach combined...