Narrow Results

This paper considers an agent-based labor market simulation to examine the influence of skills on wages and unemployment rates. Therefore less and highly skilled workers as well as less and highly productive vacancies are implemented. The skill distribution is exogenous whereas the distribution of the less and highly productive vacancies is endogenous. The different opportunities of the skill groups on the labor market are established by skill requirements. This means that a highly productive vacancy can only be filled by a highly skilled unemployed. Different skill distributions, which can also be interpreted as skill-biased technological change, are simulated by incrementing the skill level of highly skilled persons exogenously. This simulation also provides a microeconomic foundation of the matching function often used in theoretical approaches.

This paper develops two models to study the impact of trade in intermediate goods on wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labor in a developed country and a developing country. The first model assumes symmetric production technologies in the intermediate good. It predicts that trade in the intermediate good will increase wage inequality in the developed country, but decrease wage inequality in the developing country. The second model assumes asymmetric technologies in the intermediate good. It predicts that trade in the intermediate good can lead to an increase in wage inequality in both the developed country and the developing country.

This paper provides panel data evidence on trade liberalization and wage inequality in Bangladesh. Estimates from a dynamic model for five major manufacturing industries spanning the 1975–2002 period suggest that the effect of increased openness to trade is associated with a decrease in wage inequality. The result is in line with the theoretical prediction in that greater openness is expected to reduce wage inequality in developing countries.

This paper adds business services to Feenstra and Hanson’s (1996) model to show that if a country is more prosperous in business services, tending to carry out less international outsourcing activities than it would otherwise. In this model, the more varieties of specialized business services a country endows, the more welfare gains arise in the presence of positive production externalities to the manufacturing sector. Since developed countries are more prosperous in business service sector, this model helps to explain why the impact of opening trade on the dispersion of both wages and unemployment is stronger in developing economies.

This paper presents a simple model to address why openness to trade increases the dispersion in wages, unemployment, and capital intensity. However, the dispersion is stronger for developing countries. We argue that the export-oriented policy that most developing countries have widely adopted in recent decades, amplifies the dispersion in these countries. This paper also helps explain the conflicting evidence between two groups of developing countries: East Asian and Latin American. In comparison to the latter, the former has a track record since the 1960s of a miraculous performance in narrowing wage inequality and unemployment by practicing export-oriented policies.

Artificial Intelligence and associated technologies are rapidly automating routine and non-routine tasks across industries and can severely disrupt labor markets. This paper presents an agent-based, evolutionary model of labor market dynamics where workers adjust to technology shocks induced by automation. Firms produce a homogeneous service by combining the outputs of tasks performed by workers while stochastically adapting to automation of tasks causing displacement of workers. We develop a model that includes: (i) the description of occupation mobility as a directed graph where nodes represent occupations, and the directed edges represent the mobility pathways along which displaced workers can get retrained and redeployed (ii) explicit microfoundations of the processes of job matching and wage setting between firms and heterogeneously skilled workers. The model focuses on the influence of workers’ retraining choices on the employment levels and wage inequality in the labor market. Simulation results indicate distinct tipping points for unemployment and wage inequality with changes in mobility pathways along which workers retrain and redeploy across occupations. An increase in the density of mobility pathways induces a reinforcement effect on employment. Retraining displaced workers without building dense and well-distributed mobility pathways across occupations could widen wage inequality due to excessive crowding of workers around specific tasks. Our work focuses on the finance and insurance industry dataset, where we observe that the reskilling of displaced workers along occupation mobility pathways assisted by a lower retraining cost improves the unemployment levels. Also, if the firms aggressively automate their tasks, an increase in the cost of retraining increases inequality of wages in the labor market.

The deteriorating economic position of low-skilled workers relative to high-skilled workers appears to be one harmful effect of the economic globalization that took place during the 1980s and 1990s. In the present paper, we perform a time series investigation for Canada using as the dependent variable the relative wages of production and non-production workers in the manufacturing sector between 1970 and 2001. The independent variables include R&D, union density, immigration, imports from non-OECD countries, foreign direct investment, capital labor ratio, and number of workers in each group. The results show that the R&D expenditures and union density are two important variables in the explanation of the widening wage gap. The effects of immigration, imports, and FDI on wage inequality are found to be moderate.

This article brings a new perspective to the analysis of the wage effects of the Mariel boatlift crisis, in which an estimated 125,000 Cuban refugees migrated to Florida between April and October, 1980. The author revisits the question of wage impacts from such a supply shock, drawing on the cumulative insights of research on the economic impact of immigration. That literature shows that the wage impact must be measured by carefully matching the skills of the immigrants with those of the incumbent workforce. Given that at least 60% of the Marielitos were high school dropouts, this article specifically examines the wage impact for this low-skill group. This analysis over-turns the prior finding that the Mariel boatlift did not affect Miami’s wage structure. The wage of high school dropouts in Miami dropped dramatically, by 10 to 30%, suggesting an elasticity of wages with respect to the number of workers between −0.5 and −1.5.

This chapter develops a model that incorporates workers’ fair wage preferences into a general equilibrium framework with monopolistic competition between heterogeneous firms à la Melitz (2003). By assuming that the wage considered to be fair by workers depends on the productivity and thus the economic success of the firm they are working in, we can study the determinants of profits, involuntary unemployment and within-group wage inequality in a unified framework. We use this model to investigate the effects of globalization. In a benchmark case with identical costs of entering domestic and foreign markets, there are gains from trade accompanied by distributional conflicts, which have so far not been accounted for in the literature: A simultaneous increase of average profits and involuntary unemployment as well as a surge in within-group wage inequality.

This chapter analyzes the effects of redistribution in a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms in which a fair-wage effort mechanism leads to firm-specific wage payments and involuntary unemployment. The redistribution scheme is financed by profit taxes and gives the same absolute lump-sum transfer to all workers. International trade increases aggregate income and income inequality, ceteris paribus. If, however, trade is accompanied by a suitably chosen increase in the profit tax rate, it is possible to achieve higher aggregate income and a more equal income distribution than in autarky, provided that the share of exporters is sufficiently high.