This note estimates the long-run demand for skilled and unskilled labor using panel data for Colombian manufacturing plants. Unobserved heterogeneity and measurement error problems that commonly arise in microdata production estimates are examined. Output measurement errors cause OLS estimators to underestimate the output and wage response of employment demand. Time-difference estimators exagge...

Development accounting exercises generally assume that skilled and unskilled labor services are perfect substitutes. However, it is known that if labor services are imperfectly substitutable, this assumption might lead to an overestimation of uniform efficiency differences, and an underestimation of skilled labor efficiency differences. To quantify the importance of this mechanism, one needs to...

Labor market frictions are even more pervasive in developing countries than in Western industrialized economies. In spite of this, stochastic models of frictional markets have rarely been applied to developing countries. In this paper, we estimate structural parameters of both a simple and an extended job separation model with the purpose of understanding constraints in the labor market in Boli...

This paper, instrumented with six theorems, shows that differences between firms in labor productivity, capital intensity and relative demand for skilled labor can be explained by differences in the substitution parameters between capital, skilled and unskilled labor in the presence of skill biased technical change. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper contributes to the question of how taxation of corporate profits and wages affects competition among firms for highly skilled human resources such as CEOs. Use of a theoretical model shows that wage taxes can have a substantial impact on the outcome of such a competition if marginal tax rates are different as in an international labor market. Further, the paper shows that increasing ...

This paper aims at explaining unemployment persistence in Spain by the so–called “ladder” e¤ect. This arises when high-skilled workers who do not ...nd a job corresponding to their skill accept jobs which previously were occupied by less quali...ed sta¤. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model, in which two types of workers — characterized by their level of formal education — coexist on ...

The rate of change in the share of skilled labor has increased steadily over the past 35 years in Swedish manufacturing. A closer inspection of the period after 1970 indicates that while relative supply changes of skilled labor seem to have been the main driving force behind the growing skill shares in manufacturing industries over the period 1970-85, an acceleration in the relative demand for ...

The article aims to explain what kind of intercultural communication competence is needed in border crossing labor markets. The experiences of international higher education students and information and communications technology (ICT) experts are analyzed in different Finnish working and educational environments. We seek answers to the following questions: How are language and communicative abi...

1 — Abstract — This paper examines the process of technology adoption and its interaction with local labor market conditions. In particular, we examine cross-city differences in PC-adoption, relative wages, and changes in relative wages over the period 1980-2000 to evaluate whether the patterns conform to the predictions of a neo-classical model of technology choice. Our approach melds the lite...