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...

Investigating the robustness of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis, this analysis incorporates two novel features. First, effective labor is modeled as the product of a quantity measure - number of employees with a given level of education - and a quality index, depending on, i.a.,...

In "Capital-Skill Complementarity and Inequality: A Macroeconomic Analysis," Krusell et al. (2000) analyzed the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis as an explanation for the behavior of the U.S. skill premium. This paper shows that their model's fit and the values of the estimated...

This paper analyzes the effect of globalization (lower trade costs) on production and trade patterns if firms are vertically linked, stages of production differ in labor-factors intensity and countries differ in labor-factors prices. In order to reflect the Continental Europe experience,...

Rising inequality in the relative wages of skilled and unskilled labor is often attributed to skill-biased technological progress. This paper presents a model in which the adoption of skill-biased or "unskilled-biased" technologies is endogenous. Conventional wisdom states that an increase in...

Demand for less skilled workers plummeted in developed countries in the 1980s. In open economies, pervasive skill biased technological change (SBTC) can explain this decline. The more countries experiencing a SBTC the greater its potential to decrease local demands for unskilled labor by...

Demand for less skilled workers plummeted in developed countries in the 1980s. In open economies, pervasive skill biased technological change (SBTC) can explain this decline. The more countries experiencing a SBTC the greater its potential to decrease local demands for unskilled labor by...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

This paper investigates the effects of the takeover of a domestic establishment by foreign owners on the domestic target's development of wages for skilled and unskilled workers. We pay particular attention to identifying the causal effect, using a propensity score matching approach combined...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...