We use the French Customs files, an exhaustive account of the international trade transactions carried out by firms across the period 1986–1992, to analyze the link between imports, exports, employment, and skill structure of French manufacturing firms. Our data allow us to distinguish between imports of finished goods and imports of intermediate inputs. Our results show that there is a strong correlation between increasing imports, in particular imports of finished goods, and job destruction, most notably destruction of production jobs. Interestingly, the strength of the relation between job destruction and imports is stronger for larger firms. For example, within production jobs, the association between increasing imports of finished goods and destruction of unskilled jobs is only found in large firms. These findings are robust to the introduction of firm-level measures of innovation.
When labor markets are imperfectly competitive, firms may be willing to finance general training if the wage structure is compressed, that is, if the increase of productivity after training is greater than the increase in pay. We propose a novel way of testing this proposition, which exploits the variation in training incidence and in the training wage premium within the European Union. Our results unambiguously show that (general) training incidence is higher in clusters - defined by country, sector, occupation and educational attainment - with a lower training wage premium, measured as the differential between the median wage growth of trained and untrained employees.
n.a.
This paper shows that a large fraction of the 1973-2003 growth in residual wage inequality is due to composition effects linked to the secular increase in experience and education, two factors associated with higher within-group wage dispersion. The level and growth in residual wage inequality are also overstated in the March Current Population Survey (CPS) because, unlike the May or Outgoing Rotation Group (ORG) CPS, it does not measure directly the hourly wages of workers paid by the hour. The magnitude and timing of the growth in residual wage inequality provide little evidence of a pervasive increase in the demand for skill due to skill-biased technological change.
Exposure to minimum wages at young ages could lead to adverse longer-run effects via decreased labor market experience and tenure, and diminished education and training, while beneficial longer-run effects could arise if minimum wages increase skill acquisition. Evidence suggests that as individuals reach their late 20s, they earn less the longer they were exposed to a higher minimum wage at younger ages, and the adverse longer-run effects are stronger for blacks. If there are such longer-run effects of minimum wages, they are likely more significant than the contemporaneous effects on youths that are the focus of research and policy debate.
© 2004 European Expert Network on Economics of Education This e-mail address is protected against spambots. Please activate JavaScript in order to see them. | Home | Site Map | Contacts | Impressum | Printversion
