This thesis tests for a shift in the organization of production from mass to flexible production using data on the skill composition of manufacturing employment. Mass production involves high volume output of standardized goods using highly specialized, dedicated capital equipment and a division of labor that seeks efficiency by reducing to the bare minimum the number of tasks performed by each...

Abstract Economic development and accompanying structural changes of the economy create new opportunities, however not everywhere for everyone. Development increases demand skilled labor, improving their welfare perceptions, but low-skilled workers feel more insecure worse off economically. This adverse effect results from a mismatch between local labor individual skill sets. To measure levels ...

Winners and Losers among Skilled Migrants: The Case of Post-Accession Polish Migrants to the UK We test if migration leads to increased wages. We take the example of Polish migrants to the United Kingdom and focus on the mobility of well educated Poles. We offer insights into absolute and relative change in wages of the migrants, utilizing the data from the UK and Polish labor force surveys. We...

The last few decades of the twentieth century witnessed fairly dramatic changes in the labor market outcomes and socioeconomic status of American workers at the bottom of the earnings distribution. Earnings of the least skilled adults either stagnated or fell. Moreover, labor force participation and employment have declined considerably, suggesting a reduction in demand for the labor of the lea...

Skill-Biased Technical Change is a shift in the production technology that favors skilled over unskilled labor by increasing its relative productivity and, therefore, its relative demand. Traditionally, technical change is viewed as factor-neutral. However, the observed rapid rise in the relative wage of skilled workers in conjunction with an upward trend in their relative supply means that rec...

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of optimal minimum wage policy in a perfectly competitive labor market. Introducing a minimum wage is desirable if the government values redistribution toward low wage workers. This result remains true in the presence of optimal nonlinear taxes and transfers. In that context, a minimum wage effectively rations low skilled labor which is subsidized by t...

a r t i c l e i n f o Since September 2000, as a result of mobility restrictions, the supply of Palestinian workers competing for local jobs in the West Bank has increased by about fifty percent. This paper takes advantage of this unique natural experiment to study the effects of labor supply shocks on labor market outcomes. Using quarterly information on wages and employment in each city in th...

This paper shows that the development from an agricultural regime through industrialization to a manufacturing regime occurs simultaneously to the demographic transition and the change in labor structure towards an increasing fraction of skilled labor due to technological progress. The manufacturing sector is economically viable when the technological level is sufficiently high. During the indu...