In both the U.S. and the OECD, highand low-paying occupations expanded relative to middle-wage occupations during the 1990s and 2000s. We explore changes in the age structure of occupations as a means to analyze the reallocation of workers from middleskill occupations towards the tails of the distribution. We posit that occupations typically expand by hiring young workers and contract by curtai...

We examine the role of employee treatment in firms’ access to informal finance form trade credit. find that better improves amount a firm can obtain. This effect is stronger environments with (1) more intensive product market competition, (2) highly customized inputs, (3) lower social capital and (4) high demand for skilled labor. Furthermore, varies according firm's financial health liquidity....

This paper focuses on impact of computerization on the work and retirement decisions of the cohort of 51-61 year old individuals who entered the Health and Retirement Study in 1992 and have been followed for next 18 years through 2010. I use data on cognition and detailed occupations in the HRS linked to a measure of occupational computerization from the O*NET data assembled by the Bureau of La...

The importance of skilled labor and the inalienability human capital expose firms to risk losing talent at critical times. Using Swedish microdata, we document that lose workers with highest cognitive noncognitive skills as they approach bankruptcy. In a quasi-experiment, confirm financial distress drives these results: following negative export shock caused by exogenous currency movements, aba...

The skills of residents in a local area matter for tax revenue, and increasing evidence suggests that skills also increase local productivity and growth. The determinants of the geographic distribution of skills at a point in time are the previous generation’s distribution of skills, the intergenerational transmission of skill from parents to children, and migration of differently skilled indiv...

The benchmark of this paper is the Fujita and Thisse (2002) core-periphery model, which adds a R&D sector with skilled labor to create new varieties for the modern sector. The number of R&D firms increases not only with the number of existing patents and knowledge spillovers but also with the number of skilled workers who can migrate and choose the region offering the better lifetime salary. Th...

Since changes in trade openness are typically confounded with other factors, it has been difficult to identify the labor market consequences of increased international trade. The advent of the United States Interstate Highway System provides a unique policy experiment, which I use to identify the effect of reducing trade barriers on the relative demand for skilled labor. The Interstate Highway ...

A process of endogenous human capital formation is analyzed in combination with the existence of trade unions and banks. By lowering opportunity costs for schooling, trade unions provide incentive for human capital investments for parts of the workforce. Imperfect competition in the banking sector creates a self-selection situation favorable for long-term investment giving firms the possibility...

Bright Minds, Big Rent: Gentrification and the Rising Returns to Skill* In 1980, housing prices in the main US cities rose with distance to the city center. By 2010, that relationship had reversed. We propose that this development can be traced to greater labor supply of high-income households through reduced tolerance for commuting. In a tractlevel data set covering the 27 largest US cities, y...