Despite macroeconomic stabilization and structural reforms, employment problems have persisted in Latin America. The 1990s have seen a slowdown in the rate of job creation, unemployment rates have stagnated at about 10%; informal sector employment has expanded, and increases in real wages have been particularly favorable to skilled workers. The purpose of this article is to explain this apparen...

Inequality between world citizens in the mid-19th century was such that at least a half of it could be explained by income differences between workers and capital owners in individual countries. Real income of workers in most countries was similar and low. This was the basis on which Marxism built its universal appeal. More than 150 years later, in the early 21st century, the situation has chan...

This paper studies the effects of unemployment policies in a simple static general equilibrium model with adverse selection in the labor market. Firms offer a contract that induces the selfselection of workers. In equilibrium, all unskilled workers are screened out and some skilled workers are rationed out. It is shown that the provision of unemployment insurance (UI) raises involuntary unemplo...

unskilled women workers, including hotel housekeepers, despite a major contribution to the quality of the facilities, usually have invisible and less known position. while good understanding of their situation and the factors affecting their job performance can significant gains in improving their living conditions and improve the quality of services related to human resources in the tourism in...

In this paper we estimate the employment effects of a reduction in weekly normal hours in West German manufacturing on the basis of an econometric models using industry panel data. We distinguish between unskilled, skilled and high-skilled workers and show that labor demand elasticities with respect to real wages differ significantly between these three skill groups. Given wages, the direct emp...

Policies to Create and Destroy Human Capital in Europe Trends in skill bias and greater turbulence in modern labor markets put wages and employment prospects of unskilled workers under pressure. Weak incentives to utilize and maintain skills over the life-cycle become manifest with the ageing of the population. Reinvention of human capital policies is required to avoid increasing welfare state ...

Research on family-friendly measures at the workplace reveals that these instruments are the outcome of a long history of struggle, mainly by the women’s movement, with antecedents in social and political thought, as well as in social and political policies and practices. These include feminist debates on marriage and the family, on paid and unpaid work, on careers, on state policies regarding ...

This paper analyzes a model in which firms and workers have to engage in costly search to find a production partner, and endogenizes the skill, job, and wage distributions in this context. The presence of search frictions implies that there are two redistributive forces in the labor market. The first is mismatch relative to the Walrasian economy; skilled workers tend to work with lower physical...

Capital accumulation can modify the relative productivity between skilled and unskilled workers, leading to changes in the wage structure. In particular, if capital goods are relatively more complementary to skilled workers, a positive correlation between investment in physical capital and the wage premium would be expected. In this paper, we present evidence for this hypothesis by taking advan...

The general objective was to investigate how maternal childhood and adulthood social class contribute to social inequalities in low birth weight, neonatal mortality and postneonatal mortality, particularly the combined influence of childhood and adult class and a comparison of influence on outcomes with regard to time distance from birth. Analyses were performed on a large sample of Swedish bir...