We study a critical driver of future wages: peers. Using linked employer-employee data for Italy, we explore peer effects in two directions. First, using a novel estimation method and accounting for the endogenous sorting of workers into peer groups and firms, we estimate the impact of the...

Following the notion of skill-biased FDI flows from developed to less developed regions, high-skilled workers are likely to benefit from FDI to a larger extent. They earn a productivity advantage that potentially transfers into a skilled wage premium. This gives rise to distributional conflict...

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...

Census data show that since 1980 low-skill workers in the United States have been increasingly employed in the provision of non-tradeable time-intensive services - such as food preparation and cleaning - that can be broadly thought as substitutes of home production activities. Meanwhile the wage...

In this paper I provide a new explanation for the increasing inequality between skilled and unskilled. This work introduces a problem solving based model in which agents invest in technological innovations to solve problems and sell their solutions in the market. Each agent has feasible set they...

In recent decades, many industrialized economies have witnessed a pattern of job polarization. While shifts in labor demand, namely routinization or offshoring, constitute conventional explanations for job polarization, there is little research on whether shifts in labor supply along the labor...

In recent decades, many industrialized economies have witnessed a pattern of job polarization. While shifts in labor demand, namely routinization or offshoring, constitute conventional explanations for job polarization, there is little research on whether shifts in labor supply along the labor...

In recent decades, many industrialized economies have witnessed a pattern of job polarization. While shifts in labor demand, namely routinization or offshoring, constitute conventional explanations for job polarization, there is little research on whether shifts in labor supply along the labor...

Using data from 10 Western European countries, I provide evidence that the fall in prices of information technologies (IT) is associated with a lower share of employment in middle wage occupations and a higher share of employment in high wage occupations. The decline in IT prices has no robust...