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...

Although the adverse labor market effects of economic recessions have been well documented, a notable omission in the literature is how recessions impact workers’ job match quality. This paper considers the short and longer-term losses in productivity associated with the job changing brought...

Although the adverse labor market effects of economic recessions have been well documented, a notable omission in the literature is how recessions impact workers' job match quality. This paper considers the short and longer-term losses in productivity associated with the job changing brought in...

Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology shocks in a VAR with long-run restrictions....

Although recessions negatively affect labor market outcomes, we find that individuals with greater cognitive skills have been less affected by recessions since 2000 compared to those in the 1980s and 1990s. This result occurs despite a decrease in the returns to cognitive skills over the last...

Drawing on data from 11 successive waves of yearly wage surveys carried out by the Public Employment Service in Hungary from 1992 to 2003, the paper examines, with the use of elementary statistical tools, whether or not earnings fluctuations differ in size across groups of employees with...

How skills acquired in vocational education and training (VET) affect wages and employment is not clear. We develop and estimate a search and matching model for workers with a VET degree. Workers differ in interpersonal, cognitive and manual skills, while firms require and value different...

The evolution of the U.S. skill premium over the past century has been characterized by a U-shaped pattern. The previous literature has attributed this observation mainly to the existence of exogenous, unexpected technological shocks or changes in institutional factors. In contrast, this paper...

This paper investigates how much of the difference in wage distributions is related to differences in skill distributions and whether a compressed wage distribution is associated with high unemployment across core OECD countries. Some countries that have more compressed (dispersed) wage...

We propose a simple theory of under- and over-employment. Individuals of high type can perform both skilled and unskilled jobs, but only a fraction of low-type workers can perform skilled jobs. People have different non-pecuniary values over these jobs, akin to a Roy model. We calibrate two...