China experienced drastic economic openness and industrialization from 1860s to 1936. However, little quantitative evidence has been collected to study the extents and impacts of these changes. This project estimates nominal wage series in nearly fifty Chinese cities from 1858 to 1936 using newly constructed Maritime Custom employees’ wage data. It also constructs cost of living indices on the ...

Fears of rising income inequalities loom large in recent discussions of how globalization and in particular migration are affecting economies and societies [1]. This paper addresses the question how labor immigration is related to wage inequality by using a specific-factors trade model. We show that the impact of immigration of low or highly skilled labor on wage inequality depends mainly on th...

T his study investigated the effect of international labor migration on Iran’s economy using a neo-classical growth model with the assumption of labor heterogeneity within the framework of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. After solving the model, the obtained equations were linearized and different values were assigned to the parameters according to Iran’s economy inform...

Domestic innovations and technology imports play important roles in boosting relative demand for skilled labor force. These factors are in turn influenced by domestic R&D investments and international trade. Using a translog cost function, this paper studies the effect of technology imports and other factors including output level and physical capital stock on the shares of skilled labor force ...

We measure U.S. publicly traded companies’ exposures to skilled labor risk, i.e., the potential failure in attracting and retaining skilled labor, by the intensity of their discussions on this issue in their 10-K filings. We show that this measure effectively captures firm risk due to the mobility of skilled labor. We find that skilled labor risk is an important determinant of corporate compens...

Past research has emphasized two critical economic concerns that appear to generate anti-immigrant sentiment among native citizens: concerns about labor market competition and concerns about the fiscal burden on public services. We provide direct tests of both models of attitude formation using an original survey experiment embedded in a nationwide U.S. survey. The labor market competition mode...

When do labor laws protect workers from workplace risks, and when do they serve to institute or insulate the privilege of particular political and economic actors? This paper argues that Latin American labor laws are highly politicized, and have been since their early origins. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the first labor codes were formulated to favor skilled, unionized labor ...

The Demand for Labor: An Analysis Using Matched EmployerEmployee Data from the German LIAB. Will the High Unskilled Worker Own-Wage Elasticity Please Stand Up? This paper uses matched employee-employer LIAB data to provide panel estimates of the structure of labor demand in Germany, 1993-2002, distinguishing between highly skilled, skilled, and unskilled labor and between the manufacturing and ...