Building on the task-based approach of technological change, this paper discusses the interaction between occupational polarization (e.g. a gradual increase of native employment in the lowest and highest-paying jobs) and employment opportunities of immigrant workers. Using high quality...

This paper examines job polarization at the level of local labor markets in Germany over a 30-year period. The major explanation of job polarization is skill biased technological change (SBTC): new technologies are complementary to high paying jobs but substitute workers in routine manual jobs...

Matches between workers and jobs are better in thick labour markets than in thin ones. This paper measures match quality by the gap between worker skills and their job tasks in the Netherlands. The smaller the gap, the better the match between skills and tasks. The measured gaps are 14 percent...

Economic debate about the consequences of immigration in Germany has largely focused on the wage effects for natives at an aggregate level. Especially the role of imperfect substitutability of migrants and natives gained importance. A new topic is to focus on the firm level by estimating...

Large metropolitan regions with pollution, congestion and high rents remain the supernatural economic places. The mystery of what exactly raises productivity in large cities continues. Going back to the famous pin factory of Adam Smith, the answer might be that city workers are able to...

Empirical evidence for the US shows that migrants increase the productivity of regions. To explain the impact of migrants on the average firm productivity we construct a general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003). We consider heterogeneous firms with different...

The labor markets of most industrialized countries are polarized. This means that employment has grown 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. However, there exists no measure that allows a...

This paper uses the task-based view of technological change to study employment and wage polarization at the level of local labor markets in Germany between 1979 and 2007. In order to directly relate technological change to subsequent employment trends, we exploit variation in the regional task...

Economic debate about the consequences of immigration in Germany has largely focused on the wage effects for natives at an aggregate level. Especially the role of imperfect substitutability of migrants and natives gained importance. A new micro oriented approach is to focus on the firm level by...

This paper examines empirically the relationship between under-employment and migration amongst five cohorts of graduates of Scottish higher education institutions with micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency. The data indicate that there is a strong positive relationship...