I develop a model for a small, open, technology-lagging economy that imports leading-edge knowledge from the technology leader by paying high-skilled researchers from the leading country their opportunity cost to train the lagging country's future high-skilled workers while adding to a local...

Japan is in the midst of a protracted spell of depressed economic activity. Japan's economic stagnation has occurred against a background of rising earnings risk. Occupational stability is falling as routine occupations disappear and implicit lifetime employment guarantees are gradually...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

We analyze the effects of automation on the wages of high-skilled and low- skilled workers and thereby on the evolution of wage inequality. Our model explains the simultaneous presence of i) increasing per capita GDP, ii) de-clining real wages of low-skilled workers, and iii) an increasing...

The paper lays out a hypothesis about the effect global oversupply of labor had on induced technological change, clarifying how it might have contributed to the demand reversal for high skill workers and other recent observed trends in technological change in the US. The argument considers the...

We examine in this paper how macroeconomic performance, mainly in the role of high and volatile rates of inflation, affected earnings inequality in the 1980s and early 1990s in Brazil. The empirical evidence presented shows that the extreme inflation, combined with the incomplete indexation...

For a large set of countries, we document how the labor earnings inequality varies with GDP per capita. As countries get richer, the mean-to-median ratio and the Gini coefficient decline. Yet, this decline masks divergent patterns: while inequality at the top of the earnings distribution falls,...