Trade unions tend to reduce the dispersion of wages among their members. Skilled workers may therefore have an incentive to separate from an encompassing union and organize into a separate craft union. This paper examines a theoretical model to gain insight into the structure of trade unions at a firm. We show that imperfect competition in the product market may drive skilled and unskilled work...

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, are able to shield workers from the effect of recessions. We estimate a dynamic life-cycle model of education choice, labor supply and wage progression using detailed administrative data for Germany for numerou...

Fairness considerations within the …rm are introduced into the determination of wages in a two factor Pissarides-style model of search unemployment to study its implications for the unemployment rates of unskilled and skilled workers in both the closed economy case and when the economy can o¤shore some inputs. While the e¤ect of a fair-wage constraint on unskilled workers takes the form of an i...

This paper reconsiders the cost of business cycles under incomplete markets. Primarily, we focus on the heterogeneity in the cost of business cycles among agents with different skill levels. Unskilled workers are subject to a much larger risk of unemployment during recessions than are skilled workers. Moreover, unskilled workers earn less income, which limits their ability to self-insure. We ex...

European Union economies are pressed by (i) a demographic change that induces population ageing and a decline of the workforce, and (ii) a split labour market that is characterized by high levels of unemployment for low-skilled people and a simultaneous shortage of skilled workers. This lack of flexible high-skilled workers and the aging process has created the image of an immobile labour force...

This paper studies the interlinked relationship between globalisation and technological upgrading in affecting employment and wages of skilled and unskilled workers in a middle income developing country. It exploits a unique longitudinal firm‐level database that covers all manufacturing firms in Turkey over the 1992‐2001 period. Turkey is taken as an example of a developing economy that, in tha...

We study the e¤ects of additional distortions or shocks, such as a fair-wage constraint and/or the possibility of o¤shoring unskilled jobs, in a two-factor general equilibrium model of unemployment with search frictions. While the direct point of impact of such shocks is on unskilled workers, we also …nd interesting indirect spillover e¤ects on skilled workers. A binding fair-wage constraint in...

A well-established stylised fact is that employer provided job-related training raises productivity and wages. Using UK data, we further find that job-related training is positively related to subsidies aimed at reducing training costs for employers. We also find that there is a positive, albeit quantitatively small, relationship between wage inequality and training inequality in the UK. Motiva...

Following Keen and Marchand (1997), the paper analyses the effect of fiscal competition on the composition of public spending in a model where capital and skilled workers are mobile while low skilled workers are immobile. Taxes are levied on capital and labour. Each group of workers benefits from a different kind of public good. Mobility of skilled workers provides an incentive for jurisdiction...

This paper develops a North-South trade model in which the South produces food and the North produces both food and a high-tech good. Food production is undertaken by unskilled workers while the high-tech product is made only by horizontally differentiated skilled workers. Due to the possibility of a peergroup effect, we allow the unskilled workers in the North to be equally or more productive ...