The paper presents a study conducted through a cross sectional research design and a quantitative content analysis method to categorize and provide a numerically based summary of the different abilities requested in online routine labor markets like Mechanical Turk. These markets are growing nowadays for the outsourcing of routine information processing tasks. This is mainly due to the existenc...

We offer a unified analysis of the growth of low-skill service occupations between 1980 and 2005 and the concurrent polarization of US employment and wages. We hypothesize that polarization stems from the interaction between consumer preferences, which favor variety over specialization, and the falling cost of automating routine, codifiable job tasks. Applying a spatial equilibrium model, we co...

AIM Healthcare facility management requires the optimisation of the quality of services offered. METHODS The Authors adopted a questionnaire as a means to assess customer satisfaction and needs. The Questionnaire has been designed to address adults, i.e., parents or guardians of children attending the Paediatric unit as patients. To estimate their degree of satisfaction, either regarding the ...

This paper considers a world of two symmetric countries with two factors and two sectors. Outputs of the two sectors are imperfect substitutes and sectors differ in relative factor intensity. Each sector contains a continuum of heterogenous firms that produce differentiated goods within their sector. Trade is costly and there are both variable and fixed costs of exporting. The paper shows that ...

We present a simple model to explain why wage inequality in the U.S. increased in the 1980s but decreased in the 1970s, in which we argue that educational investment might deteriorate wage inequality temporarily, but permanently decrease it. A country would not necessarily present the Kuznets inversed-U curve if having sufficient educational investment. Acceleration in the educational investmen...

The question of how to build the capabilities to both initiate a resurgence of growth and facilitate Mexico’s transition into a broader set of growth enhancing industries and activities is pressing. In this regard it seems important to understand the quality of the skills of the labor force. Moreover, in increasingly knowledge based economies it is not just the skills of the typical worker than...

This paper uses three years of individual-level data to analyze the determinants of individual preferences over trade and immigration policies in the United States. Different economic models make contrasting predictions about what forces should shape these preferences. We have four main empirical results. First, we find that factor type dominates industry of employment in explaining support for...

BACKGROUND The majority of births in Mexico take place in a health facility and are attended by a skilled birth attendant, yet maternal mortality has not declined to anticipated levels. Coverage estimates of skilled attendance and other maternal and newborn interventions often rely on women's self-report through a population-based survey, the accuracy of which is not well established. METHODS...

The positive correlations found between computer use and human capital are often interpreted as evidence that the adoption of computers has raised the relative demand for skilled labor, the widely touted skill-biased technological change hypothesis. However, several models argue that the skill intensity of technology is endogenously determined by the relative supply of skilled labor. We use ins...