This paper provides new evidence on the nature of occupational differences in unemployment dynamics, which is relevant for the debate between the structural or hysteresis hypotheses. We develop a procedure that permits us to test for the presence of a structural break at unknown date[...]

This paper reviews the literature on two-sided atomeless assignment models of workers to tasks. Using simple parametric examples, the fundamental differences between the comparative advantage and the scale of operations models are illustrated. Holding the distributions of abilities and tasks and...

Skill-biased technical change is usually interpreted in terms of the efficiency parameters ofskilled and unskilled labor. This implies that the relative productivity of skilled workerschanges proportionally in all tasks. In contrast, we argue that technical changes also affectthe curvature of...