Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Skill Biased Technological Change'

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 essay consists of three chapters. In chapter 1, I find that wages in U.S. regions have been diverging instead of converging from 1975 onward. This coincides with the period of accelerating skill-biased technological change. A decomposition of the divergence rate indicates three channels underlying the divergence: (1) an ever-widening wage gap between college graduates and high school graduates, (2) an increasing within-education group wage differential across regions, and (3) a concentration of skill composition across local labor markets. I then developed an endogenous skill-biased technology adoption model in which firms invest capital more intensively in regions with higher employment share of college graduates, explaining these three channels jointly. Finally I quantitatively assess the model by separately calibrating the regional aggregate production function; the results show that the relative skilled-labor efficiency has been persistently higher in skill-abundant regions, nevertheless the countrywide skill-biased technological change, is the main force making divergence happening. Chapter 2 studies energy-saving technological change in U.S. manufacturing sector, whose intensive margin and extensive margins are identified. I find that energy and capital are mostly complementary to each other, while labor is substitutive to energy-capital composite. However, a Cobb-Douglas nesting of labor is rejected. Quantitative exercise shows that in the post-crisis period, within in industry energy-saving technological change accounts for the largest proportion of the aggregate sectoral energy efficiency promotion in the long run. In contrast, in the short run, factor adjustment combined with sectoral shift accounts for the largest proportion of energy intensity reduction. Lastly, I provide evidence that structural change has taken place around the oil crisis in 1970s, which is consistent with the existing literature. In chapter 3, I documented the increasing dispersion of skill composition across different areas in the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S. Housing Market has experienced a dramatic increase in the housing price, as well as a similarly increase in its dispersion across metropolitan areas. A set of related stylized facts are documented in this paper. First, the real wage goes similarly as real housing prices, but quantitatively different. Second, the rents and housing prices have not been going in the exactly same way, in terms of first two moments. Third, we find that local income inequality is positively correlated to the local housing price level. Based on these observations, we build a model where a dispersed skill-biased technology change can account for all the phenomena at the same time.
Ph. D.

Most of the literature on skill-biased technological change views both skilled and unskilled labour as variable inputs. In contrast, this study focuses on the role of skilled workers comprising overhead labour in the recent increase in skill demand. The fi�rst chapter focuses on the aggregate shift in skill demand, while succeeding chapters focus on the heterogeneity of this demand across �rms. In the fi�rst chapter, I argue that the transition from Ford-style mass production toward mass customization in the 1980s may be responsible for the increase in skill demand since introducing new goods requires fi�xed labour input, which is biased towards skilled workers. I present a dynamic general equilibrium model, which explains both the rapid growth in skill demand since the 1980s and the recent puzzling slowdown since the late 1990s. However, as the ratio of fi�xed to variable inputs cannot increase inde�nfinitely, my model also predicts that the growth in skill demand will slow down in the long run. In the second chapter, using UK manufacturing data, I show that the employment share of non-production workers is positively correlated with �rm size but negatively correlated with the latter over time. I argue that this serves as evidence for the existence of (partially) �xed skilled labour, with the premise being that �rms with larger �xed input are both larger in size and have a higher share of non-production workers. However, short-run output expansion only increases variable labour, and therefore it decreases the employment share of non-production workers. In the third chapter, I present a second piece of evidence in support of the main thesis of this dissertation. I show that exiting �rms as well as entering �rms have a higher share of non-production workers in UK manufacturing industries. This phenomenon is rather puzzling as exiting �firms have lower labour productivity, but nevertheless the �finding presents itself as being consistent with the contention of this study that skilled workers constitute an overhead labour input.

Using a two-sector model of production with potentially different capital shares in each sector, I show that the evolution of the skill premium from 1970 to 2005 is consistent with skill-neutrality and even a mild unskill-bias of technological change for plausible values of capital shares. The main channel of adjustment to changes in labor supply is instead via the reallocation of capital. New investment occurs predominantly in the skilled sector, to the detriment of the unskilled sector of the economy. This result is shown both theoretically in a simple model and in a quantitative exercise using data on the US economy. Repeating the exercise with industry level data for the US reveals that there has indeed been skill-biased technological change in a number of industries (such as Business Activities and Health), while others have experienced skill neutral and unskill-biased technological change (e.g. Agriculture). This difference in results across industries is largely due to very different capital shares. Finally, I look at the impact of the increasing importance of information and communication technology (ICT) on the production function and the skill premium in each industry. I estimate a translog price function with skilled and unskilled labor, ICT capital and non-ICT capital as factors of production and find that most industries exhibit ICT capital-skill complementarity. For most industries, technological progress has led to an increased use of both types of capital, but the results on skill-biased technological change are as mixed as in chapter two. ICT has affected the skill premium negatively in nearly two thirds of the industries studied.

Nella tesi si vogliono quantificare gli effetti dei provvedimenti governativi che vanno sotto il nome di “Piano Nazionale Industria 4.0:Acquisizione di Competenze e Investimenti Innovativi” sulla crescita economica attraverso la simulazione degli scenari di politica sul modello QUEST III-Italia modificato con la introduzione di equazioni che consentano di trattare il fenomeno dello “Skilled Biased Technical Change” (SBTC) e “innovazione di processo.” Il primo obiettivo viene raggiunto endogenizzando le quote di lavoratori occupati. La relazione ipotizzata è tale per cui la quota dei superstar workers e la quota dei non routinized skilled workers dipenda con una relazione logistica, e quindi crescente, dalle nuove idee. Al contrario, i routinized skilled workers costituiranno la categoria residuale e che quindi diminuisce all’aumentare delle nuove tecnologie. Questa categoria residuale è stata introdotta al fine di modellare la sostituibilità tra routinized skilled workers e tecnologie. Il secondo obiettivo viene raggiunto modellizzando la produttività del capitale fisico legata agli spillover delle nuove idee. La quota di nuove idee non coperta da brevetto, porta, attraverso gli spillover, ad una produttività totale del capitale fisico, maggiore del costo di acquisto del capitale fisico stesso. Tale produttività, influenza gli investimenti nell’equazione di accumulazione del capitale fisico, facendo sì che il valore del capitale fisico sia maggiore del suo costo d’acquisto. I principali risultati tratteggiano un contesto economico italiano di crescita seppur non sostenuta, e tale da allontanare l’Italia dal rischio di crescita zero. Il processo di crescita endogena esplica interamente il suo effetto solo nel lungo periodo, quando il capitale umano ha completato l’intero processo di formazione ed è effettivamente allocato nel settore di R&D e quando tutti gli effetti delle riforme governative hanno trovato attuazione. Dal lato dell’occupazione la crescita economica è frenata principalmente dalla mancanza di infrastrutture tali da sostenere il processo di formazione dei lavoratori previsto dal piano. Le nuove tecnologie non trovano terreno fertile dal lato delle competenze, e dal lato delle infrastrutture, con il risultato che questo potenziamento delle competenze porta solo nel lunghissimo periodo ad un aumento dell’occupazione altamente qualificata. Nel breve periodo le nuove tecnologie portano un insieme limitato di lavori low skilled complementari ad esse, che induce un aumento dell’occupazione low skilled, che decrementa a sua volta man mano che queste mansioni vengono automatizzate.
Abstract In this thesis, an attempt is made to evaluate the effects on growth of the National Plan Industria 4.0, the government set of policy measures articulated in two main policy frames known as Skill Achievements and Innovative Investments. The quantitative evaluation is performed through the simulation of policy scenarios within a modified version of the model QUEST III-Italy. Model changes have been implemented for enabling a more satisfactory treatment of the “Skill Biased Technical Change” (SBTC) and “Process Innovation”. The first aim is reached through the endogenization of the skill-shares of employed workers. In the relationship introduced the production of new ideas influences the share of superstar workers and the share of non-routinized skilled workers according a logistic relationship; while routinized skilled workers are allocated in a residual category that reduces as new technologies increase. This mechanism allows for the consideration of the substitutability between routinized skilled workers and technologies. The second aim has been reached modeling the spillover of the physical capital productivity. The share of new ideas not covered by patents is not included in the acquisition cost of physical capital, but provides, through spillovers, a total physical capital productivity higher than the acquisition cost of physical capital itself. This productivity affects investment in the physical capital accumulation equation, making the value of physical capital higher than its acquisition cost. The main results put in evidence a positive trend for the Italian economy so to move Italy out of the zero growth threat. The endogenous growth process entirely explicates its effect only in the long run when human capital has completed the education process and is really effective in R&D sector and when all the effects of government measures have been put in operation. From the employment point of view economic growth is reduced mainly by the lack of infrastructures to support the workers education process forecasted by the plan. New technologies can find their way both through the skills and through the infrastructures, with the result that this empowerment of skills leads to an increase in high skilled workers only in the very long run. In the short run new technologies will bring a limited set of other low skilled jobs, complementary to them, which induce to an increase in low skilled employment, which decreases when these skills will be digitalized.

Income inequalities have become a matter of major concern following reports that the working class and lower middle class of developed economies have income levels that are falling behind. Few studies have been conducted on the regional level even though this perspective might better capture the development of income inequalities, since national averages might hide local differences. This study uses panel data for 286 Swedish municipalities in between 1991-2017 and fixed effect regressions, to examine if the theory of a skill-biased technological change could be used to explain resent developments. We find an labor income divergence for Swedish municipalities within the studied time period. The share of high skilled workers is found to be a good predictor of the growth in regional labor income inequalities, while an ageing population of the regions falling behind counteracts the growth of inequality, possibly leading to an underestimation of the size of regional labor income divergence. These results are in support of a skill-biased technological change at work and a job polarization transforming regional labor markets and regional societies. We conclude that adopting a regional perspective in the analysis and development of future economic growth policies is necessary to ensure long term economic growth, equality of opportunity and social cohesion.

This thesis is concerned with the two main causes of wage inequality in the Malaysian labour market during the period 1983--1999. These are the impact of changes in trade patterns and technological change. These two hypotheses have been well tested using the Heckscher-Ohlin and Samuelson (HOS) models following the pioneering work by Lawrence and Slaughter (1993), Haskel and Slaughter (1998--2002) and Wood (1994). This theoretical framework provides three methodologies to measure relative demand changes namely: a decomposition approach, a cost function approach and the use of earnings equations which can then be used to examine the significance of trade and technology in determining the changes. All of these are used in the study. The study has employed two sets of data. Firstly, we have used the five-digit aggregate data for the manufacturing sector between 1983--1999 to estimate the changes that take place between, and within, industries in the sector. The second set of data comprises micro-level data from the Household Income Survey (HIS) for several years during the period 1984 to 1997. As far as the different sets of data are concerned, at a macro-level we have divided labour groups into skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers. On the other hand, the skills measured in the micro-level data are based on the workers' levels of education though we have based these on similar levels of skill as in the macro analysis. The main finding of this thesis is that changes in the relative demand for labour favour semiskilled workers and that technological change is the main explanation for the changing pattern of employment in the Malaysian economy. The study also finds that changes in the pattern of trade have had only small effects in explaining the changes in the relative demand for labour. Notwithstanding this, this study finds a some support for the prediction of the basic HOS model in that trade can explain the changes in industry skill wage premia at higher levels of education. In addition, and not unexpectedly, trade is also found to increase the relative demand for production workers at low levels of education. Interestingly, the study also finds that technological change is more dominant in explaining changes in the relative demand for males whilst the effects of trade are most evident for female workers. Finally, the study also shows that changes in relative demand are most evident in terms of the way they affect employment rather than through changes in wage levels.

Among better-educated employed workers, the fraction of full-time full-year (FTFY) workers is quite high and stable over time in the U.S. Among those with low education levels, however, this fraction is much lower and considerably more volatile. These observations suggest that the composition of unobserved skills is subject to sharp movements within low-educated employed workers, while the scale of these movements is potentially much smaller within high-educated ones. The standard college premium framework accounts for the observed shifts between education categories, but it cannot account for unobserved compositional changes within education categories. This thesis uses Heckman'
s two-step estimator on repeated Current Population Survey cross sections to calculate a relative supply series that corrects for unobserved compositional shifts due to selection in and out of the FTFY status. We find that the well-documented deceleration in the growth rate of relative supply of college-equivalent workers after mid-1980s becomes even more pronounced once we correct for selectivity. This casts further doubt on the relevance of the plain skill-biased technical change hypothesis. We conclude that what happens to the within-group skill composition for low-educated groups is critical for fully understanding the trends in the relative supply of college workers in the United States.

Negli anni ’80, paesi in via di sviluppo (DCs) e paesi meno sviluppati (PMS) hanno subito cambiamenti strutturali, muovendosi da politiche di sostituzione di importazione a strategie di liberalizzazione. Questi paesi hanno assistito ad una crescita dinamica risultata dall’aumento della produttività dovuto alla maggiore esposizione delle industrie locali alla concorrenza, dall'aumento delle importazioni tecnologiche incarnate in capitale e in beni intermedi, e ad una maggiore diffusione di conoscenze e informazioni. Questo lavoro esamina come liberalizzazione commerciale ed aggiornamento tecnologico abbiano influito sull’occupazione in paesi DCs e PMS, e studia il fenomeno del cambiamento tecnologico skill biased. Si esaminano il settore manifatturiero turco tra il 1980-2001 e quello etiope tra il 1996-2004. Questo studio, basato sul System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM-SYS), implementa un quadro dinamico di due equazioni che raffigurano tendenze occupazionali a livello enterprise per lavoratori qualificati e non qualificati. I risultati confermano l'aspettativa teorica che DCs e LDC affrontano fenomeni di skill-biased technological change e incrementano il potere d’importazione di tecnologia, aumentando il divario d’occupazione tra lavoratori qualificati e non qualificati. Tuttavia, le cause specifiche di skill-bias e la portata del loro effetto possono variare in base a diverse infrastrutture istituzionali e capacità nazionali.
In the 1980's developing countries (DCs) and least developed countries (LDCs) underwent structural changes, moving from import substitution policies to liberalization strategies. These countries witnessed a dynamic growth effect that emerges from productivity growth due to increased exposure of local industries to competition, increased technological imports embodied in capital and intermediate goods, and to the transfer of knowledge. This work looks into the employment impact of trade liberalization and technological upgrading in DCs and LDCs, and studies the phenomenon of skill biased technological change in those countries. It takes the case of the Turkish manufacturing sector for the period 1980 - 2001, and the case of the Ethiopian manufacturing sector for the period 1996 - 2004. It deploys System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM-SYS) procedure to this effect, implementing a two-equation dynamic framework that depicts enterprise-level employment trends separately for skilled and unskilled workers. The results confirm the theoretical expectation that DCs and LDCs face the phenomena of skill-biased technological change and skill-enhancing technology import, both leading to increasing the employment gap between skilled and unskilled workers. However, the specific determinants of skill bias and the size of their effect can differ due to diverse institutional infrastructures and national capabilities.

Bibliography: p. 255-270.
There has been considerable liberalisation of the South African economy since the early 1980s. During the 1990s, the liberalisation process coincided with rising skill and capital-intensity of production and substantial declines in the employment of less-skilled labour. This theris draws upon a variety of empirical and theoretical methodologies to investigate the contributory impacts of trade liberalisation and technological change to the changing skill structure of employment in South Africa since the early 1980s.

This thesis studies the cyclical aspect of job polarization in Europe. Contributions include offering a comparison to the findings of previous research on the United States, and extending the analysis by introducing labor market institutions. The analysis is done in two parts, first showing that the observed link between job polarization and jobless recoveries in the US is observed in Europe, but not across all countries and business cycles. In Scandinavia, the process of job polarization appears smoother than the spurts observed in the US. The second part involves regression analyses of the relationship between labor market institutions, the business cycle and occupational employment. The results indicate that stricter labor market institutions are less robustly associated with Routine employment than other occupational groups and that Routine employment is more sensitive to the business cycle than other types of employment. Further, rigid labor market institutions may prevent some of the Routine decline associated with economic downturns, while not necessarily affecting the long run employment. Limitations of the analysis regards rough estimates of the key variables, number of observations and the lack of identification associated with cross-country analyses.

Esta tesis doctoral es una colección de tres artículos. Los capítulos 1 y 2, co-autorados con Joachim Voth, investigan por qué Europa en 1700 ya era más rico que el resto del mundo y por qué Inglaterra fue el primer país en industrializarse. Encontramos que las dinámicas de la población, en lugar del crecimiento de la productividad, fueron los promotores más importantes del desarrollo económico de Europa Occidental durante la temprana edad moderna (1450-1700). Calibramos un modelo probabilístico para representar Inglaterra en 1700 y encontramos que ingresos iniciales más altos unidos a limitaciones de fertilidad aumentaron la probabilidad de industrialización. En el tercer capítulo, presento un nuevo hecho estilizado y analizo su contribución al sesgo del cambio tecnológico hacia los trabajadores más cualificados: El porcentaje de trabajadores cualificados en la producción intermedia está altamente correlacionado con la proporción de trabajo cualificado en la producción final. Esto genera un efecto multiplicador que refuerza la demanda de trabajo cualificado a lo largo de la cadena de producción. El efecto es importante, explica más de un tercio del aumento de la demanda de trabajadores cualificados en la industria manufacturera de EE.UU.
This dissertation is a collection of three essays. Chapters 1 and 2, co-authored with Joachim Voth, investigate the question why Europe in 1700 was ahead of the rest of the world and why England was the first country to industrialize. We find that population dynamics, rather than productivity growth, were the most important drivers for Western Europe to overtake China in the early modern period (1450-1700). We calibrate a probabilistic model to match England in 1700 and find that higher initial per capita incomes together with fertility limitation increased its industrialization probabilities. In the third chapter, I present a novel stylized fact and analyze its contribution to the skill bias of technical change: The share of skilled labor embedded in intermediate inputs correlates strongly with the skill share employed in final production. This delivers a multiplier that reinforces skill demand along the production chain. The effect is large, accounting for more than one third of the observed skill upgrading in U.S. manufacturing.

This thesis is composed by three studies, whose common goal is advancing our knowledge of the properties of cross-country production technologies In the first part we focus on across-country inequality, tackling the issue of cross-country dispersion of incomes. The objective of growth theory is that of explaining the observed shape of the world income distribution (WID) and to eventually predict its future evolution. The existence of large cross-country productivity differences, measured by the residual dispersion of incomes left unexplained by the dispersion of observable quantities (physical and human capital), calls for the rejection of the hypothesis of a common world technology. We introduce a novel specification of the technology index, linking productivity to cross-country knowledge spillovers, that is empirically testable and has the potential to account for the observed pattern of productivity differences. We investigate two possible knowledge spillovers structures in a dynamic general equilibrium framework, and we characterize the equilibrium or long-run WID for each of them. We show that with appropriate technology knowledge spillovers, in which each country extracts useful knowledge only from countries operating similat technologies, the long-run WID is in general clustered and the world economy is splitted in distinct technological neighbourhoods, giving a possible explanation for the endogenous formation of convergence clubs. With backward knowledge spillovers, where the technology diffusion process is blocked by barriers to technology adoption measured by the aggregate capital intensity of an economy, the shape of the long-run WID is controlled by the strenght of the spillovers force and the degree of increasing returns of the world economy. We show that an increase of the spillovers force always amplifies the dispersion of the equilibrium WID and that growth and inequality are negatively related: the less dispersed the WID, the higher the equilibrium world rate of the world economy. In the second part we analyse the pattern of cross-country productivity differences and we test the specification of the technology index introduced in the first part. In particular we test the knowledge spillovers structures introduced in the first part over two dimensions: their ability to explain static observed cross-country productivity differences at a point in time and their consistency with the shape of the observed world income distribution. Using regression analysis to calibrate the fundamental parameters of our specification, we show that both appropriate technology and backward spillovers can explain over half of the observed productivity differences, but backward spillovers are more successful in replicating the actual shape of the WID. In the third part we tackle the issue of within-country inequality, as measured by the skill premium, the wage of skilled workers relative to that of the unskilled. We study the ability of the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis (CSC), that assumes that capital substitutes unskilled labor more easily than skilled labor, to explain observed cross-country dispersion of the skill premium. We perform a steady-state analysis, novel to the literature about CSC, linking steady-state skill premia to the relative supply of unskilled labor and to observables that control the capital accumulation process (saving rates and barriers to capital accumulation, measured by the relative price of investments). We show that CSC holds in non-OECD countries but not in the OECD subsample, reinforcing a result obtained by other studies with different techniques: this result also show a fundamental cross-country parameter heterogeneity in the production function. As a by-product of our steady-state analysis we are also able to obtain new estimates for the elasticity of substitution between couples of inputs and to discriminate between alternative thresholds for the definition of skilled labor with respect to their consistentcy with plausible values of these elasticities. Finally, the fact that observable quantities are able to explain only a limited share of cross-country dispersion of skill.premia suggests that cross-country skill-biased technology differences are at work, and capital accumulation alone cannot explain neither income differences nor cross-country differences in inequality.

Mestrado em Economia
Esta dissertação analisa a forma como o progresso tecnológico influencia o mercado laboral. Foi criado um modelo teórico com base na "routine-biased technical change", assim como uma análise empírica que avalia a forma como o conteúdo rotineiro de tarefas numa dada ocupação é afetado pela adoção de tecnologia no trabalho. Adicionalmente também foi estimado o efeito da adoção tecnológica na polarização dos rendimentos.
This dissertation addresses the way technological progress affects the structure of labor market. A theoretical framework based on the routine-biased technical change hypothesis was constructed. The empirical analysis evaluates how the routine task content of occupations is impacted by the adoption of technology at work using a linear model with a fixed-effects estimator. Additionally, the effects of technological adoption at work on the polarization of income were estimated using an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition.
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

La thèse est composée de trois articles: le premier constate pour la Colombie, que la quantité des travailleurs qualifiés et le commerce international entraînent un changement technique biaisé vers les qualifiés, augmentant l’inégalité des salaires, bien que cet effet soit compensé par l’emploi temporaire. Le deuxième analyse un modèle des entreprises hétérogènes formelles et informelles, avec plein emploi, montrant qu’une politique d’ouverture augmente la quantité des entreprises informelles et réduit sa productivité moyenne, diminuant le bien-être. Cependant, forcer les informelles à devenir formelles augmente les salaires moyens et le bien-être. Les estimations Diff in Diff dans le troisième article, présentent l'impact du boom pétrolier 2003-2013 sur les pays touchés et non touchés par la maladie hollandaise. Pour les premières, les flux commerciaux internationaux augmentent bien que l'agriculture dans une moindre mesure, alors que le chômage et le travail informel diminuent
I study the relationship between international trade and labor markets in three papers. In the first one, I find for the Colombian case, that together, the sector skill intensity and the international trade bring about more skill-biased technical change, increasing wage inequality, though such an effect is offset using temporary workers. In the second one, the analysis of a trade model with formal and informal heterogeneous firms, under full employment, shows that an openness policy decreases the average productivity of informal firms while makes formal to become informal, worsening welfare. However, forcing informal firms to become formal, increases average wages and raises welfare. In the third one, Diff in Diff estimates presents the impact of the 2003-2013 oil prices boom, on countries affected and not affected by the Dutch disease. In the former group, international trade flow increases although agriculture at a lower magnitude, while unemployment and informal labor decrease

Notre travail de recherche dans le cadre de cette thèse a porté sur les effets de la libéralisation commerciale sur le marché du travail des pays en voie de développement, avec une application spécifique à l'économie tunisienne. Nous avons structuré notre analyse sur le sujet autour de deux axes. Dans un premier temps, nous avons étudié l'impact des échanges commerciaux sur le marché du travail, et dans un deuxième temps nous avons étudié le rôle du changement technologique induit par l'ouverture commerciale. Notre recherche a présenté et discuté la littérature théorique et empirique et les faits stylisés sur le sujet. Dans notre cas d'étude sur la Tunisie nous avons estimé les équations de l'emploi total, de l'emploi du travail qualifié, de l'emploi du travail non qualifié, de l'emploi relatif entre le travail qualifié et non qualifié et du salaire réel. Les variables clés dans ces équations sont celles qui mesurent les échanges commerciaux et celles qui mesurent le changeme nt technologique importé.Les principaux résultats peuvent être résumés de la manière suivante :- L'ouverture commerciale a joué un rôle important dans le changement de la structure de l'emploi sur le marché du travail tunisien.- Le marché du travail tunisien enregistre les mêmes évolutions que celles observées dans plusieurs pays en voie de développement (tels que les pays d'Amérique Latine et d'Asie de l'Est).- Ces évolutions se manifestent par une augmentation de l'emploi relatif du travail qualifié par rapport au travail non qualifié.- Les statistiques descriptives montrent que les inégalités de salaire ont augmenté en Tunisie.- Le changement technologique biaisé vers les travailleurs qualifiés a été un facteur déterminant dans cette évolution en Tunisie. La technologie incorporée dans les machines et les équipements importés augmente l'emploi relatif des travailleurs qualifiés par rapport aux travailleurs non qualifiés.

Previous research has found evidence for the existence of skill-biased technological change in both the USA and Europe. However, similar studies are still limited in developing countries. There has not been any previous research that measured skill-biased technological change in Vietnam. The research question that this study aims to answer is if there is a skill-biased technological change in Vietnam. Based on data collected from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey from 2004 to 2014, this thesis measures the skill-biased technological change in Vietnam by measuring relative skill productivity. Relative skill productivity is calculated using the elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled workers, skill premium, the respective factor augmenting technology term of unskilled workers, and the respective factor augmenting technology term of skilled workers. The thesis developed a regression model for estimating wage as informed by the Mincer (1974) wage equation. The findings provided evidence that skill-biased technological change occurred in Vietnam during the period 2004 to 2008. It also provided empirical evidence of the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers, between male and female workers, and between urban and rural areas. This thesis provides policy recommendations to improve the wage differential and the skill of the workers in Vietnam.

This dissertation studies determinants of the U.S. labor market structure and human capital development, with a focus on technological change. A key feature of the U.S. labor market since 1980 is the substantial growth of the employment in high skill occupations and there is a substantial literature attributing this change to technological change. However, since 1999, the employment growth of high skill occupations has decelerated markedly despite continued rapid growth in technology. The first essay documents this novel trend and examines the role of technological change in explaining this phenomenon. It shows that technological advancements since the late 1990s, such as the onset of Internet, have expanded what computers can do and become substitutes for high skill occupations. This change can explain a substantial portion of the stagnancy in employment growth for high skill occupation in the 2000s. The second essay examines the role of computer adoption in explaining the differences in the change of gender wage gap between 1980 and 2000 across cities in the United States. It uses the city-level routine task intensity in 1980 to predict the subsequent increase in computer adoption and shows that cities with one percent greater increase in computer adoption experienced a 0.7 percent more decrease in the change of male-female wage ratio between 1980 and 2000. Computerization explains about 50 percent of the decline in the male-female wage gap between 1980 and 2000. The third essay studies the causal effect of maternal education on the gender gap in children’s non-cognitive skills. It shows that maternal education reduces boys’ disadvantage in non-cognitive behaviors relative to girls at age 7. To explain the mechanism of this effect, it provides suggestive evidence that better educated mothers spend more time going outings with boys while reading to girls at age 7, and going outings could be more closely related to non-cognitive development than reading.

Since the 1980’s, income inequality has increased markedly and is at the highest level ever since it has been recorded in the U.S. This paper uses an overlapping-generations model with incomplete markets that allows for household heterogeneity and that is calibrated to match the U.S. economy with the purpose to study how skill-biased technological change (SBTC) and changes in taxation quantitatively account for the increase in inequality from 1980 to 2010. We find that SBTC and taxation decrease account for 48% of the total increase in the income Gini coefficient. In particular, we conclude that SBTC alone accounted for 42% of the overall increase in income inequality, while changes in the progressivity of the income tax schedule alone accounted for 5,7%.

In the last decades, income inequality has been on the rise in theU.S. The growing skill premium suggests the pivotal role of skill-biased technological change (SBTC) in promoting the observed in-crease in inequality levels. In this context, labor income tax struc-tures have been central to the policy debate. I develop an overlap-ping generations model to perform a welfare evaluation of Univer-sal basic income (UBI) tax structures and verify how these interactwith SBTC. I find that an UBI system would have improved so-cial welfare in 2010 when compared to the existing tax system anddetermine that this result is primarily motivated by SBTC.

The relation between technological progress and inequality has a long tradition in economics, of which the most recent chapter concerns the increase in automation induced by the fall in computing prices. The greater automation of tasks shifts the demand for labor, reducing the demand for workers in activities that could be performed by machines. Di erent degree of complementarity between various types of labor and new technologies leads to changes in the wage distribution that favor high skilled workers. Both patterns received con rmation in some developed countries. Earlier studies show that technological progress induced a greater polarization of the labor market: average wages and employment grew disproportionately in occupations at the top and at the bottom of the income distribution. However, these analyses tend to focus on aggregate data, which limited the hypotheses to be tested. In this thesis, we contribute to the literature by analyzing the relationship between technological change and two labor market outcomes (wages and employment) using individual level data. Such data allow answering new questions. First, while literature indicates an increase in wage inequality between occupations, we analyze whether a similar process is visible within occupations. Technological progress raised the demand for complex tasks, involving autonomy and creativity of the workers, where di erences in productivity among workers might be more notorious, leading in turn to greater wage inequality. Alternatively, technological progress could have also increase income inequality by promoting reallocation of workers, as workers changing jobs might lack the skills required to perform at the same level as more tenured workers. Using data from the European Union, we show that both mechanisms played a role. We observe that occupations where activities are complementary to machines present higher wage dispersion. Second, literature analyzed the polarization of labor demand employing aggregate data, which is agnostic on how workers adjust to the new labor market conditions. Workers in occupations more prone to automation might have experienced longer unemployment patterns and more job instability as a result of the need to adapt their skills to the new demand. Moreover, among older workers, changes in the labor demand could trigger movements out of the labor market. These considerations stand at the heart of the second part of the analysis, for which we employ panel data from Germany and Great Britain. The results indicate that concerns over more unstable careers and longer unemployment should be taken seriously. However, we did not nd evidence that workers in occupations more prone to automation modi ed their labor supply decisions as a result of technological change.

Analizzando la disoccupazione tecnologica come un allungamento dei tempi della disoccupazione frizionale, diviene evidente come la formazione e l'aggiornamento del capitale umano risultano essere fondamentali per un corretto reinserimento dei lavoratori che hanno perso il loro posto di lavoro a causa dei processi di automazione e della transizione a un'economia dei servizi. Superate le paure dettate da una possibile "jobless society" e mantenendo una visione critica delle prospettive economiche che si rifanno al motto "laissez faire, laissez passer", emerge come le istituzioni pubbliche e il Terzo Settore divengono degli attori socio-economici di primaria importanza nei percorsi di reinserimento occupazionale dei disoccupati e degli scoraggiati. In particolare il Terzo Settore, attraverso interventi di natura culturale e formativa, favorisce una diffusione di quelle skills (soprattutto le digital skills e le soft skills) che riducono le distanze tra l'offerta e la domanda di lavoro diminuendo i rischi dell'insorgenza di una disoccupazione di tipo frizionale.

The process of economic growth and its distributional e ects have major welfare consequences, creating advanced and developing economies. Modern growth theory highlights the role of capital ac- cumulation, human capital and technology in explaining cross-country economic and income variations. Forefront research exploring these questions emphasizes the primary importance of the institutional factor in determining technological progress and leading to di erent economic growth outcomes. This thesis aims at bringing its feasible contribution to the on-going research on income inequality and eco- nomic growth by considering the fundamental causes of structural, technological and political features of economic organisation. The rst part of the thesis investigates how institutions and policies, as important determinants of economic incentives, may condition economic growth and income inequality. Based on a comprehensive critical assessment of related literature, we rst develop a conceptual discussion on how institutional quality may in uence the e ciency of redistribution policy speci cally associated with human capital accumulation. We identify political rivalry as the main factor negatively a ecting the decisive role of political institutions and consequently distorting e cient redistribution policy. Given these theoretical insights, we next study the e ects of political rivalry on human capital accumulation and income inequality in a framework of an endogenous growth model with elements of new political economy. Our results suggest that while non-distortionary redistribution via public education equalizes income levels and increases human capital accumulation, political rivalry produces negative outcomes in all dimensions of considered economic interactions. The key conclusions of the theoretical model are then tested in a cross-sectional empirical study. Our ndings clearly indicate that, for speci c groups of countries with similar income and geographical location characteristics, political rivalry has indeed a negative e ect on educational investments, individual learning choice, GDP per capita and income inequality. In the second part, the topics of economic growth and income inequality are investigated from a di erent perspective, namely that of analysing recent changes in the composition of employment, wage structure and aggregate production, which represent an important part of the process of mod- ern economic development. More speci cally, we use a standard directed technological change model, extended by complementarities between intermediate goods in production and internal costly invest- ments, to examine the behaviour of economic growth rate, technological-knowledge bias, skill premium and industrial structure. While our analysis suggests that equilibrium growth rate is directly a ected by costly investments and complementarities, the latter also in uencing equilibrium technological- knowledge bias and industrial structure, equilibrium skill premium is determined solely by workers' productivities. This may imply that the persisting increase in wage inequality observed in several de- veloped countries over the last decades may have been due to increases in productivity advantages of skilled workers favoured by technological development. We then extend our analysis by quantitatively associating empirical facts on the technology and skill structure to the degree of gross substitutabil- ity/complementarity between technological goods. This estimation exercise also allows us to quantify the long-run relationship between the Tobin-q and both the degree of complementarity between tech- nology goods and the complexity e ect of horizontal R&D, through the impact of the last two factors on the long-run economic growth rate. Our estimation and calibration exercise suggests the existence of a moderate degree of gross complementarity between technological goods and of an elastic relationship between the Tobin-q and key technology parameters.

In this thesis, I propose that bike courier delivery is not merely a convenient service for clients but an important function in the operation of successful economies. By allowing the regions to function at higher speeds, same-day courier networks seem to play an active role in generating positive economic outcomes. The availability of courier networks is found to be as uneven as economic vitality itself. Cities like New York and Toronto have large, dense courier networks, capable of delivering items within an hour while smaller cites, do not support same-day courier service at all. They do this, in part, by allowing for couriers to cope with the precariousness of their work, and in part by providing supportive sub-cultures. These findings point to the role of service workers, and wider eco-systems in fostering regional advantage.