The US labour market has experienced a remarkable polarization in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, recent empirical work has documented a sharp increase in the wealth to income ratio in that period. Contemporary to these inequality trends, the US faced a fast technological catch-up as European...

The US labour market has experienced a remarkable polarization in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, recent empirical work has documented a sharp increase in the wealth to income ratio in that period. Contemporary to these inequality trends, the US faced a fast technological catch-up as European...

We use a large sample of German workers to analyze the effect of low-wage competition with China and Eastern Europe (the East) on the wage structure within German manufacturing industries. Utilizing the method by Abowd et al. (1999), we decompose wages into firm and worker components. We find...

The share of low-income countries in global exports nearly tripled between 1990 and 2015, driven largely by the rapid emergence of China as an exporting powerhouse. While research in economics had long acknowledged that trade with lower-income countries could raise income inequality in Europe...

This paper examines the distributive impact of economic globalisation, technological progress and changes in labour market policies, regulations and institutions in OECD countries over the past quarter century, up to the Great Recession. It identifies the relevant pathways between macro-economic...

We depart from the trade and wages literature and its emphasis on North-South trade, examining North-North by developing the basic linkages between trade-based integration and relative wages in an Ethier-type division of labor model. Using this model we identify a formal relationship between...

In this paper, we explore the role of trade in differentiated final goods as well offshoring of tasks for inequality both within and between countries. We emphasize the distinction between managerial and production labor. Production labor is assumed to be a variable input composed of tradable...

The phased elimination of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement has been one of the most compelling trade policy reforms of the early twenty-first century, and has brought in significant changes in the industrial structures of the countries of the global south. The textile and clothing industry is the...

We use a dynamic general equilibrium trade model with comparative advantage, heterogeneous firms, heterogeneous workers and endogenous firm entry to analyze economic policy meant to compensate the losers of trade liberalization and reduce the ensuing wage inequality. We consider several...

We use Chinese firm-level data from the World Bank Investment Climate Survey to examine the link between importing intermediates and intra-firm wage inequality. Our results show that intermediate input importers not only have a significant wage premium but also have a greater intra-firm wage...