ington retirement study. Unpublished papers, available from Dr R.C. Taylor). Between 1964 and 1966 Dr John Martin conducted a comprehensive investigation of retirement among workers at the Pilkington Glass Factory in St Helens. He grouped sample members (n = 684) according to skill level and the length of time expected to elapse before retirement, and in the case of those who had already retire...

In this article we assume two levels of skills and two classes of goods, one produced with a technology requiring high skills, the other produced with a technology that can be operated by both low and high skilled workers. Our model generates two distinct labour market regimes. In one regime we show technical change can be the cause of wage divergence between skilled and unskilled workers. This...

South Africa simultaneously lost more than 890,000 jobs and increased the number of skilled workers from 1989 to 1999. We argue this is the consequence of well-documented acute apartheidera distortions which led to a current coordination failure where (i) firms are locked into a mostly skill-intensive technology where they have very little demand for semi-skilled and unskilled labor, and (ii) t...

In this lecture, we address the evidence on the Skill Biased Technical Change hypothesis. There are at least Þve class of theories that I can discern, and I'll say something about each time permitting: 1. Capital skill complementarity 2. Correlations and timing: Computer technology and skill upgrading 3. Characteristics of technology and tasks: Changes in the organization of work 4. Nelson/Phel...

This paper analyzes the career progression of skilled and unskilled workers, with a focus on how careers are affected by economic downturns and whether formal skills, acquired early on, can shield workers from the effect of recessions. Using detailed administrative data for Germany for numerous birth cohorts across different regions, we follow workers from labor market entry onwards and estimat...

In many economies, studies have found large wage differentials not accounted for by workforce characteristics, collective bargaining, or market power. Researchers attribute these differentials to either unobserved worker quality or pay incentives designed to elicit worker effort. This article finds empirical support for an alternative explanation: These wage differentials result from firms’ tec...

Industrial Relations and the Wage Differentials between Skilled and Unskilled Blue-Collar Workers within Establishments: An Empirical Analysis with Data of Manufacturing Firms Increased wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers is a stylized fact, which can be observed in many developed countries. Among the explanations advanced for this phenomenon is the increasing globalization, a...

When skilled workers migrate, they face the brain waste risk, i.e., they can end up employed as unskilled. We analyze the effects of brain waste on brain drain, resulting from low international transferability of skills. We show that this type of brain waste: (1) reduces education incentives; (2) weakens the chances for a positive self-selection; and (3) decreases the possibility of a brain gai...

In this contribution, we present an endogenous growth model which essentially extends the idea of the paper by Murphy, Riddell and Romer (1998). In that paper, the authors assume that technical progress leads to wage differentials between high-skilled workers and unskilled workers. As technical progress occurs, the relative marginal productivity of different input changes. Yet, if there is suff...

This paper contributes to the search theory of unemployment by endogenously generating matching functions for skilled and unskilled workers from a wage-posting game. The model is capable of producing a positive skill premium and a positive wage di®erential among homogeneous unskilled workers. The skill premium arises from a skill-biased technology; the wage di®erential among unskilled workers s...