The HIV epidemic has dramatically decreased labor supply among prime-age adults in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using within-country variation in regional HIV prevalence and a synthetic panel, I find that HIV significantly increases the capital-labor ratio in urban manufacturing firms. The impact of HIV on average wages is positive but imprecisely estimated. In contrast, HIV has a large positive impact ...

Historically, industrialization has been associated with falling relative returns to skills. This fact is at odds with most theories of industrialization, which tend to imply rising skill premia as natural concomitants to economic growth. This paper develops a simple model of economic demography to help solve this puzzle. Conjecturing that households wished to maximize both their levels of inco...

Following the notion of skill-biased FDI fl ows from developed to less developed regions, high-skilled workers are likely to benefi t from FDI to a larger extent. They earn a productivity advantage that potentially transfers into a skilled wage premium. This gives rise to distributional confl ict that might turn into heterogeneous attitudes toward FDI infl ows in line with skill. In this paper ...

We document for a broad panel of advanced economies that increases in GDP per capita are associated with a shift in the composition of value added to sectors that are intensive in high-skill labor. It follows that further development in these economies leads to an increase in the relative demand for skilled labor. We develop a two-sector model of this process and use it to assess the contributi...