Article history: Received 6 January 2012 Revised 20 August 2012 Available online 17 October 2012 JEL classification: F16 F22 F66 J61 O15

Drawing on the author’s work, this lecture presents evidence on U.S. income and wealth inequality. It presents series for top income and wealth shares, and the distribution of economic growth by income groups. It discusses the mechanisms behind the evolution of U.S. income and wealth inequality from historical and comparative perspectives. It analyzes the role of public policy and in particular...

This paper studies the implications of globalization for aggregate output and welfare when risk averse workers face the risk of unemployment. The impact of globalization on the welfare of workers and aggregate output depends on the degree of substitutability between domestic workers and imported inputs. When the degree of substitutability is high (low), then globalization reduces (increases) wa...

Nike and other brand companies have long been the target of widespread criticism for outsourcing their manufacturing production to contract factories with dismal working conditions. Despite the overwhelming amount of public interest, there exists no theory for studying this topic. The current paper fills this gap. In the model, the most productive firms in the North make high profits and outsou...

It is widely believed that globalization affects the extent of employment and wage responses to economic shocks. To provide evidence for this, we analyze the effect of firms’ exporting behavior on the elasticity of labor demand. Using rich, German administrative linked employer-employee panel data from 1996 to 2008, we explicitly control for self-selection into exporting and endogeneity concern...

This paper examines the sectoral and intertemporal impacts of international emigrant remittances by using a vector auto-regression (VAR) estimation focusing on Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam (CLMV countries). The reason for targeting the CLMV countries is that they have still depended largely on remittance-earnings from their emigrant workers in their economies, and that the macroeconom...

This study addresses the impact of offshorability (a job characteristic indicating how easily a job can be offshored) on employment changes and worker mobility in Germany. A composite measure of offshorability for German data is used which broadens existing measurements such as Blinder (2009). Contrary to what the literature suggests, there is no evidence that net employment creation is higher ...

Female Migration and Native Marital Stability: Insights from Italy* In this paper, we argue that the size and the composition of the female migrant population in a given area can affect the marital stability of natives. We take Italy as a case-study and we offer discrete-time event history models predicting marital disruption on data from the nationally – representative 2009 Family and Social S...