I argue that increased foreign competition can affect technical choice and skill differentials even when actual imports do not rise significantly. I present a model of General Oligopolistic Equilibrium ("GOLE") in which a reduction in import barriers (whether technological or policy-imposed) encourages more strategic investment by incumbent firms. The predictions accord with many of the stylise...

We partially identify the average treatment effect of education on earnings and nonparametrically estimate its upper bound for African, Coloured (mixed race) and White males in South Africa. We address endogenous selection into education, cohort effects and endogenous selection into work. Using the September 2007 South African Labour Force Survey, the upper bound estimates are considerably lowe...

This paper proposes and evaluates a mechanism through which imports of unskilled intermediates (offshoring) benefit both skilled and unskilled workers by inducing capital deepening and innovation in developed countries. Data for manufacturing industries in the US over 1974-2005, show that although offshoring increases inequality between skilled and unskilled workers, unskilled workers also gain...

This paper develops a model of job mobility and wage dispersion with asymmetric information. Contrary to existing models in which the superior information of current employers leads to market collapse, this model generates a unique equilibrium outcome in which a) positive turnover exists and b) identical workers may be paid di¤erently. The model implies that, in the presence of technological ch...

The New Deal for Young People (NDYP) is one of the main components of the UK government’s Welfare-to-Work strategy aimed at raising employment and reducing benefit dependency. It combines elements of an active labour market programme with a stricter benefit regime. This paper evaluates its impact on the wider economy, emphasising the importance of the programme’s effect on wage pressure, which ...

Empirical researchers often combine multiple instrumental variables (IVs) for a single treatment using two-stage least squares (2SLS). When effects are heterogeneous, common justification including IVs is that the 2SLS estimand can be given causal interpretation as positively weighted average of local (LATEs). This requires well-known monotonicity condition. However, we show with more than one ...

We reassess the effect of minimum wages on US earnings inequality using additional decades of data and an IV strategy that addresses potential biases in prior work. We find that the minimum wage reduces inequality in the lower tail of the wage distribution, though by substantially less than previous estimates, suggesting that rising lower tail inequality after 1980 primarily reflects underlying...

This paper studies the relationship between three measures of relative earnings and firm performance based on data of 664 listed manufacturing companies in China over the period 2005-2012. It finds that (1) capital earnings relative to labor earnings and the overall average wage level relative to a firm’s average wage level had negative effects on firm performance; (2) the earnings of high-leve...

Attitudes towards Economic Risk and the Gender Pay Gap This paper examines the links between gender differences in attitudes towards economic risk and the gender pay gap. Consistent with the literature on the socio-economic determinants of attitudes towards economic risk, it shows that females are much more risk averse than males. It then extends this research to show that workers with more fav...

Multinational firms pay relatively high wages. Less is known about the wage structure within multinational and non-multinational firms. We examine the impact of acquisitions on wage dispersion in Sweden using a large matched employer-employee data set. Foreign acquisitions of Swedish firms increase wage dispersion by increasing wages for high-skilled workers. The positive impact is concentrated...