Suchergebnisse

This paper studies the pattern of job opportunities over the last two decades in European countries. We find that the share of high-skilled jobs have been expanding over time, while the share of medium-skilled jobs have been declining. These changes are in line with the US patterns and, according to the previous literature, they come from recent technological changes. However, our data show an interesting difference between the US and Europe: in Europe there is not any increase in the share of low-skilled employment. Moreover, we find that the difference between the proportion of employment hired in low-skilled and medium-skilled jobs is negatively correlated with both the unemployment rate and the degree of employment protection in the labour market. We propose a theoretical model to study the effects of a technological shock on the employment structure in a unionized economy. By accounting for the collective bargaining process, our model may fit Continental Europe better than the previous ones. We conclude that the definition of the union policy is crucial in order to explain observed cross-country heterogeneity in low-skilled employment.

The authors study the evolution of the wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers in Italy from 1977 to 2004. In this period, the differentials do not show a clear trend (apart for a feeble increasing trend in the very last years) and they fluctuate around a fairly stable mean. Four factors may influence the evolution of those differentials: relative supply of skilled and unskilled workers, technological change (which may be biased toward a certain category), international commerce, and, finally, institutions in the labour market. After discussing some of these aspects from a theoretical point of view, the authors perform an econometrical analysis for the Italian case with the SUR estimation technique, and test which of these factors are important in explaining the evolution of the differentials and how they affect different categories of workers.