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"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. This paper investigates the impact of unskilled workers' earnings on crime. Following the literature on wage inequality and skill-biased technological change, we employ CPS data to create state-year as well as state-year-and (broad) industry specific measures of skill-biased technological change, which are then used as instruments for unskilled workers' earnings in crime regressions. Regressions that employ state panels reveal that technology-induced variations in unskilled workers' earnings impact property crime with an elasticity of -1, but that wages have no impact on violent crime. The paper also estimates, for the first time in this literature, structural crime equations using micro panel data from NLSY97 and instrumenting real wages of young workers. Using state-year-industry specific technology shocks as instruments yields elasticities that are in the neighborhood of -2 for most types of crime, which is markedly larger than previous estimates. In both data sets there is evidence for asymmetric impact of unskilled workers' earnings on crime. A decline in earnings has a larger effect on crime in comparison to an increase in earnings by the same absolute value"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

In Canada, the General Social Survey of 1989 provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between skill and autonomy for individuals in different industrial sectors, occupations, and demographic groups. It also enables an examination of the extent to which the introduction of new technology is associated with various combinations of skill and autonomy. Overall it is found that the association between skill and autonomy is not very strong; moreover, it varies considerably by sector, occupation, and demographic group. In addition, individuals most likely to report both high skill and high autonomy tend to have been affected by the introduction of new technology in the 1984-1988 period.

The evolution of the U.S. skill premium over the past century has been characterized by a U-shaped pattern. The previous literature has attributed this observation mainly to the existence of exogenous, unexpected technological shocks or changes in institutional factors. In contrast, this paper demonstrates that a U-shaped evolution of the skill premium can also be obtained using a simple two-sector growth model that comprises both variants of skill-biased technological change (SBTC): technological change (TC) that is favorable to high-skilled labor and capital-skill complementarity (CSC). Within this framework, we derive the conditions necessary to achieve a non-monotonic evolution of relative wages and analyze the dynamics of such a case. We show that in the short run for various parameter constellations an educational, a relative substitutability, and a factor intensity effect can induce a decrease in the skill premium despite moderate growth in the relative productivity of high-skilled labor. In the long run, as the difference in labor productivity increases, the skill premium also rises. To underpin our theoretical results, we conduct a comprehensive simulation study.

The aim of this paper is to formalise a two-country model of trade liberalisation and technological change with heterogeneous firms and search-and-matching frictions in the labour market. By considering different sectors and factors of production we allow for comparative advantages and study the trade and technology effects within and between sectors on wages and employment of skilled and low-skilled workers. Technological change together with inter-sectoral trade has distributional consequences across the labour force, favouring the skilled against the low-skilled workers. Intra-sectoral trade counteracts as it increases the demand for low-skilled workers, too. The overall effects on wages and employment of skilled and low-skilled workers depend on the extent of technological change, inter-sectoral trade and intra-sectoral trade.