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 paper examines the evolution of female labor market outcomes from 1987 to 2008 by assessing the role of changing labor demand requirements in four developing countries: Brazil, Mexico, India and Thailand. The results highlight the importance of structural change in reducing gender...

We use the individual-level data on income and education level from the EU-SILC database to investigate the trends in income distribution and wage polarization in the EU New Member States. We do not confirm the existence of job polarization in wages and employment that has been observed in the...

Government funding of innovation can have a significant impact not only on the rate of technical change, but also on its direction. In this paper, we examine the role that government grants and government departments played in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an emergent general...

Technological revolutions mark profound transformations in socio-economic systems. They are associated with the diffusion of general purpose technologies that display very high degrees of pervasiveness, dynamism and complementarity. This paper provides an in-depth examination of the technologies...

We propose an empirical analysis of testing the relationship between gender wage gap and economic growth. The study takes into account 12 manufacturing sectors in 18 OECD countries for the period between 1970 and 2005.We use industrial statistics (EU KLEMS, 2008) on female and male wages that...

This paper examines the empirical implications of technological changes for skill demand and wage inequality in Indonesia. According to the National Labor Force Survey of Indonesia, the share of educated workers and wage skill premium increased significantly over 2003-2009 for overall industry...

During the last decades, wage inequality in Germany has considerably increased both within and across regions. Building on concepts of the task-based approach, this paper studies whether and to what extent these developments are driven by technological change. We present novel evidence that...

Using a simple model with two levels of skill, we assume that high-skill workers who fail to get high-skill jobs may accept low-skill positions; low-skill workers do not have the analogous option of filling high-skill positions. This asymmetry implies that an adverse, skill-neutral shock to...

New information and communication technologies, we argue, have been 'power-biased': they have allowed firms to monitor low-skill workers more closely, thus reducing the power of these workers. An efficiency wage model shows that 'power-biased technical change' in this sense may generate rising...