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...

Throughout the industrialized world, young women outnumber young men in urban areas. This paper proposes that such a pattern may be linked to higher male incomes in urban areas. The argument is that urban areas offer skilled workers better labor markets. Assuming that there are more skilled males than females, this alone would predict a surplus of males. However, the presence of males with high...

Increased attention has recently been paid to the phenomenon of the brain drain of skilled (and often unskilled) Africans from their home countries to countries in the West. In part this is because of the relatively large percentages of skilled Africans going abroad. It is also due to the increased focus on the economic development of Africa in general, and the concern that many countries in Af...

BACKGROUND Skilled birth attendance from a trained health professional during labour and delivery can prevent up to 75% of maternal deaths. However, in low- and middle-income rural communities, lack of basic medical infrastructure and limited number of skilled birth attendants are significant barriers to timely obstetric care. Through analysis of self-reported data, this study aimed to assess t...

This paper analyses the impact of immigration on the welfare of the native population in an economy that consists of skilled and unskilled workers. Due to unionisation, the wage rate in the market for unskilled labour is above the competitive level. For a given skill endowment of the native population, we show that immigration reduces the welfare of the host country up to a certain threshold an...

How large are the welfare e¤ects of EU enlargement and to what extent are skilled workers a¤ected di¤erently than unskilled workers in each region? In this paper, imperfect labor mobility is modeled within an economic geography framework to examine the welfare implications of goods and factor market integration. While unskilled workers are immobile, forward-looking skilled workers have the opti...

Starting in the 1980s, the composition of immigrants to the U.S. shifted towards less-skilled workers. Around this time, real wages and employment of younger and less-educated U.S. workers fell. Some believe that recent shifts in immigration may be partly responsible for the bad fortunes of unskilled workers in the U.S. On the other hand, low-skilled immigrants may complement relatively skilled...

Abstract In this paper we use a large overlapping generations model with individuals that differ across age, productivity and native status to assess the effects on the pension system of different immigration quotas in the context of an aging population by computing how much should social security taxes be rised in order to pay for the pension burden in two model economies. The first one is the...

This paper analyses the effects of trade liberalisation and technical change on real and relative wages. It builds a model with monopolistic competition, heterogeneous firms and two countries, North and South, and solves it numerically. Skill-biased technical change, caused by decreases in the price of imported equipment as a result of reduced trade costs or falls in its world price, tends to i...

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 with a difference-in-differences estimator, and differences in post acquisition effects depending on the...