Skill-Biased Technical Change is one of the most prominent explanations for the rise in wage inequality in the United States over the last decades. However, the explanation is challenged for several reasons. In this paper, I propose an alternative type of technical change, where new technologies...

Making use of an international survey that directly assesses the participants' cognitive skills, I study the effect of skills on employment in 32 countries. On average, a one-standard-deviation increase in numeracy skills is associated with an 8.4 percentage-point increase in the probability of...

For the USA in 1987–2017, I document, at business cycle frequencies, that the employer-size wage premium of high-skill workers tends to be high (low) in times of low (high) unemployment relative to that of low-skill workers. The differential size wage premium between high-skill and low-skill...

I document the comovement of the skill premium with the differential employer size wage premium between high- and low-skill workers in U.S. manufacturing during the postwar era. For the baseline specification, i.e., establishments with at least 500 employees categorized as large employers and...

Using an international survey that directly assesses the cognitive skills of the adult population, I study the relation between skills and unemployment flows across 37 countries. Depending on the specifically assessed domain, I document that skills have an unconditional correlation with the...

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...

Making use of a survey that directly assesses the participants' cognitive skills, I study the relation between skills and job mobility in a large international comparison of 32 countries. Motivated by the canonical on-the-job search model, I measure job mobility by the ratio of the job-finding...

Making use of an international survey that directly assess the cognitive skills of the adult population, I document systematic differences in the effect of skills on job mobility across the 37 countries in the sample. While economic growth is associated with relatively higher job mobility among...

In this paper I illustrate how the diffusion across firms of a skill-neutral technology leads to a skill-biased impact on the economy. The model identifies (i) differences in inter-firm mobility between skill groups, (ii) productivity dispersion across firms within industries, and (iii)...

Using an international survey that directly assesses the cognitive skills of the adult population, I study the relation between skills and unemployment flows across 37 countries. Depending on the specifically assessed domain, I document that skills have an unconditional correlation with the...