This paper examines whether increased import competition induces domestic workers to skill upgrade and/or switch industries. The analysis makes use of a large unique longitudinal matched employer-employee dataset that covers virtually all workers and firms in Portugal over the 1986-2000 period....

Although theory predicts that international trade will decrease the relative demand for skilled workers in relatively skill-deficit countries, in recent decades many developing countries have experienced rising wage premiums for skilled workers. We examines this puzzle by quantifying the...

We study how the skill distribution for the whole economy responds to changes in the skill premium which are induced by trade integration. Using administrative data for both Denmark (1993-2012) and Portugal (1993-2011), we perform a two-step empirical analysis. In the first stage we predict the...

We examine changes in wage structure and wage premia during Vietnam's transition from command to market economy. Relative to other work in this literature, our paper is unique in that we identify the policies that lead to such changes. By examining skill premium trends along the two dimensions...

This paper is concerned about addressing a question that has become critical in international trade, during the past three decades: "What factors explain the worldwide increase in skill premiums following international trade integration and increasingly globalized economies"? I propose a new...

Relying on linked employer–employee data from the German manufacturing sector in 1996–2010, I study the relation between the share of exporting establishments and the skill premium within narrowly defined industries. I document that the skill premium tends to be higher in industries with a...

We develop a multi-country general equilibrium model with structural change to investigate the factors affecting the global changes in the skill premium between 1997 and 2007. Trade and technological change increase the skill premium by inducing reallocations to skill-intensive sectors. We apply...

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...

Incorporating family decisions in a two-period.model of the world economy, we predict that trade liberalization raises the skill premium and reduces child labour in developing countries where the adult labour force is sufficiently well educated to attract production activities from abroad that...

This paper documents an inverse U-shape in the evolution of wage inequality in Latin America since 1995, with a sharp reduction starting in 2002. The Gini coefficient of wages increased from 42 to 44 between 1995 and 2002 and declined to 39 by 2015. Between 2002 and 2015, the 90/10 log hourly...