In most industrialized countries, employment has grown predominately in jobs at the upper and lower tails of the wage distribution, while employment in the middle part of the distribution has stagnated or declined. This process of job polarization is well documented for a number of countries. We...

One of the key issues in economics is the explanation of unemployment and its variation across different economies. Doing so, modern mainstream macroeconomics refers to the effects of financial crises and to institutional structures and their variation across countries. However, unemployment...

A casual look at regional unemployment rates reveals that there are vast differences which cannot be explained by different institutional settings. Our paper attempts to trace these differences in the regions' labour market performance back to the regions' specialisation in products that are...

Routine-biased technological change (RBTC), whereby routine-task jobs are replaced by machines and overseas labor, shifts demand towards high- and low-skill jobs, resulting in job polarization of the U.S. labor market. We test whether recessions accelerate this process. In doing so we establish...

This paper studies the effect of foreign-owned companies (FOCs) in the region on establishment survival and growth in the Finnish business sector. We analyze whether the presence of the FOCs has asymmetric effects among the local businesses. Foreign presence in the region is measured in a novel...