This paper examines the influence of capital accumulation and imports on the relative demand for skilled and unskilled labour in Hungary between 1980 and 2002. Historical data shows that both relative employment and wages of skilled labour were favourably influenced by the changes of the past...

Trade between the U.S. and China is widely thought to have contributed significantly to the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment --- sometimes called the China Syndrome. Flipping the point of view, we examine the impact on China of the trade growth between 2000 and 2007: We divide China into...

This testimony makes three main points. First, income volatility, especially when it involves income declines, imposes significant hardships on American families. It heightens stress about finances and may increase household living expenses. These hardships are most pronounced for middle-and...

Over the past two decades, technological progress has been biased towards making skilled labor more productive. What does skill-biased technological change imply for business cycles? To answer this question, we construct a quarterly series for the skill premium from the CPS and use it to...

Several recent macroeconomic models rely on rigid wages. Especially wage rigidity of newly hired workers seems to play a crucial role, since the decision of opening a vacancy or not is mainly influenced by their real wages. However, so far little empirical evidence exists on how real wages of...

I propose a new mechanism for sluggish wages based on workers' noisy information about the state of the economy. Wages do not respond immediately to a positive aggregate shock because workers do not (yet) have enough information to demand higher wages. This increases firms' incentives to post...

We revisit the measurement of the sources and consequences of job displacement using Canadian job separation records. To circumvent administrative data limitations, conventional approaches address selection by identifying displacement effects through mass-layoff separations, which are...

Using administrative employer-employee data from Germany, we investigate the relationship between wages and past and present labor market conditions. Furthermore, we revisit recent findings of greater wage cyclicality of new hires. Overall, we find strong evidence for history dependent wages,...

Using detailed IRS administrative data on millions of households, we find that households effectively insure against much of the risk facing primary earners. We show that households face less risk than males alone, and households face roughly half the countercyclical risk increase. As a result...

This paper examines how specific human capital affects labour turnover and real wage cyclicality in a frictional labour market. I develop an equilibrium search model with long-term contracts and imperfect monitoring of worker effort. Imperfect monitoring creates a moral hazard problem that...