What are the implications of (endogenous) directed technical change for the design of redistributive income taxes? I study this question in a Mirrleesian economy augmented to include endogenous technology development and adoption choices by firms. Under certain conditions, any progressive tax...

We document changes in the structure of earnings during the economic transition in Poland. We find that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially from 1988 to 1996. A common view is that the reallocation of workers from a public sector with a compressed wage distribution, to a private...

We compare the trade and labour approaches to wage inequality. We first look at the theoretical differences, stressing the different roles ascribed to sector and factor bias, labour supply and the theory of technical change in trade models with endogenous prices. We then briefly review some of...

Standard neo-classical trade theory predicts that trade liberalisation should cause a fall in wage inequality in developing countries through a decrease in the relative demand for skilled labour. Recent studies of a number of developing countries, however, find evidence to the contrary. Using a...

The received wisdom is that a rising skill premium accompanied by a simultaneous rise in skill intensity characterizes relative wages and the employment structure in US manufacturing. However, we present evidence to show that the recent developments in the U.S. do not conform to this pattern and...

This paper considers an economy where skilled and unskilled workers use different technologies. The rate of improvement of each technology is determined by a profit-maximizing R&D sector. When there is a high proportion of skilled workers in the labour-force, the market for skill-complementary...

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 a slowdown in Hicks-neutral technical...

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...

There is important evidence of a recent upsurge of so-called residual inequality, i.e. wage inequality that cannot be explained by workers? observable attributes, such as schooling. The main purpose of this article is to review the intuitions and results of some of the main theoretical models...

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...