In this paper, using a production framework in which skilled and unskilled labor are imperfect substitutes, I analyze the time paths of the efficiencies of skilled and unskilled labor and their implications for economic growth and wage inequality in the US between 1950 and 2005. There are two main findings. First, I find that skilled labor efficiency has grown more slowly since the mid 1970s. S...

South Africa is currently confronting an HIV/AIDS crisis. HIV prevalence in the population is currently estimated at about 13% with that number projected to increase over the next five years or so. Given the massive scale of the problem and the concentration of effects on adults of prime working age, the pandemic is expected to sharply influence a host of economic and non-economic variables. Wh...

Promotion of low-skilled off-farm rural labor market participation can be an important strategy to improve livelihoods and food security of the poor in developing countries. This paper investigates rural farm households' participation in low-skilled off-farm labor markets with disaggregate data from a survey of 400 households in Tigray, the northern highlands of Ethiopia. Adopting Heckman's two...

Throughout the industrialized world, young women outnumber young men in urban areas. This paper proposes that such a pattern may be linked to higher male incomes in urban areas. The argument is that urban areas offer skilled workers better labor markets. Assuming that there are more skilled males than females, this alone would predict a surplus of males. However, the presence of males with high...

Tax competition between two governments who choose nonlinear income tax schedules to maximize the average utility of its residents when skills are unobservable and labor is perfectly mobile is examined. We show that there are no Nash equilibria in which there is a skill type that pays positive taxes to one country and whose utility is larger than the average utility in the other country or in w...

In a “New Trade”model with endogenous supply of skill, how knowledge difussion through international trade a¤ects growth and skill premium depends on responsiveness of skill supply to technological change. The less responsive is skill supply, the more likely that lower skill-premium accompanies higher growth after opening to trade. 1 Introduction This project deals with the question of what e¤e...

We investigate the implications of an integrated vis-à-vis a national perspective regarding investment in natural gas infrastructure. In particular, we analyze cross-border spillovers related to the investment expenditure of five Western European countries. We develop a practical approach to estimate such cross-border investment expenditure spillovers using a multi-regional input-output model. ...

â â â â  â  abstract â  most debates about the role of tariff cuts on the level of employment and rate of wages in labor market have come out of well-known hecscher – ohlin and stopler – samuelson (hos) theorems. considering the fact that we have divided the workforce into skilled and unskilled labors the present paper assesses the impacts of tariff cuts on labor market indicators in iran. ...