Search results for "equality"
showing 10 items of 1338 documents
Deskilling and decline in skill premium during the age of sail : Swedish and Finnish seamen, 1751–1913
2016
The study examines the evolution of skill premium and share at industry level in shipping during the age of sail. We argue that the period from the 1750s to the 1910s represented deskilling for the seamen working in sailing ships. The growth of international trade and shipping during the first era of globalization increased the overall demand for sailors but decreased the relative demand for skilled labor in favor of less skilled ones. This deskilling was associated with a decline in wage inequality, as the premium for high skilled seamen fell relative to mean wages in the shipping industry. The decline in skill premium may have facilitated the growth of trade and shipping, as the relative …
Comparing past and present wage inequality in two globalisation periods
2013
Abstract This paper compares past and present globalisation with an aim to highlighting the different factors that drove wage inequality then and those which are doing so now. We have constructed a ratio of wage inequality for 15 countries in the first period of globalisation (1870–1913) and the subsequent period of deglobalisation (1914–1930) and then compare this pattern to wage inequality in the 1980s and 1990s. We propose that the difference in wage inequality trends for the two globalisation periods is due to migration and institutional factors (education and labour market institutions). These factors offset the increase in wage inequality produced by globalisation and technological ch…
Plant Productivity Dispersion and the College Premium: Evidence from the United States 1977-1997
2015
For the United States in 1987-2014, I document at business cycle frequencies that the high-skill workers’ employer size wage premium is high (low) in times of low (high) unemployment relative to that of the low-skill workers. Specifically, the differential employer size wage premium between high-skill and low-skill workers has an unconditional correlation of -0.4 with the unemployment rate, and varies by about 6 percent over the business cycle. The skill premium itself does not exhibit a clear business cycle pattern over the sample period.
Technology Diffusion, Worker Mobility and the Returns to Skill
2015
In this paper I illustrate how the diffusion across firms of a skill-neutral technology leads to a skill-biased impact on the economy. The model identifies (i) differences in inter-firm mobility between skill groups, (ii) productivity dispersion across firms within industries, and (iii) differences in wages between small and large firms as key determinants of the skill premium. Calibrated to match differences in inter-firm mobility between skill groups and rising productivity dispersion across firms, the model ascribes one-third of the sharp increase in the skill premium in U.S. manufacturing from 1977 to 1997 to skill-neutral technical progress and the technology diffusion process itself. …
Globalization, Worker Mobility and Wage Inequality
2015
In the present paper, I integrate frictional labor markets with on-the-job search into an otherwise standard heterogeneous firm model of intra-industry trade. Most importantly, I show that the returns to workers’ inter-firm mobility are higher in a trade equilibrium than in autarky. Intuitively, by favoring large and productive firms, international trade amplifies the disparities in profitability between small and large firms. Hence, the returns to labor reallocation across firms rise. In view of the empirically observed higher inter-firm mobility among high-skill workers, this suggests a skill-biased impact of trade liberalization.
Small Employers, Large Employers and the Skill Premium
2015
I document the comovement of the skill premium with the differential employer size wage premium between high- and low-skill workers in U.S. manufacturing during the postwar era. For the baseline specification, i.e., establishments with at least 500 employees categorized as large employers and non-production workers as high-skilled, I obtain a correlation coefficient of 0.87. Exploiting variations across subindustries while controlling for other potentially relevant factors, I estimate that an increase by ten log-points in the differential size premium is associated with an increase in the skill premium by three log-points.
Spatial aggregation and resampling expansion of big surveys: An analysis of wage inequality
2020
Income inequality is becoming a growing concern, worldwide, with wage inequality being the root cause of its recent escalation. With the aim of adding to the knowledge on this subject, this paper focuses on the spatial dimension of the problem, an aspect which has received less attention in the literature. We identify the determinants of inequality in wage distribution in Spain at a provincial level using the microdata of the Structure of Earnings Survey (N = 216,769) and estimate their impact from a spatial perspective. Spatial computation of wage concentrations, however, reduces the sample size to just 52 observations, leading to model challenges. To overcome this problem, we adopt a supe…
Effects of the Blair/Brown NHS Reforms on Socioeconomic Equity in Health Care
2012
The central objectives of the ‘Blair/Brown’ reforms of the English NHS in the 2000s were to reduce hospital waiting times and improve the quality of care. However, critics raised concerns that the choice and competition elements of reform might undermine socioeconomic equity in health care. By contrast, the architects of reform predicted that accelerated growth in NHS spending combined with increased patient choice of hospital would enhance equity for poorer patients. This paper draws together and discusses the findings of three large-scale national studies designed to shed empirical light on this issue. Study one developed methods for monitoring change in neighbourhood level socioeconomic…
EGUAGLIANZA E WELFARE DEGLI IMMIGRATI: TRA SELF-RESTRAINT LEGISLATIVO E APERTURE GIURISPRUDENZIALI E CONTRATTUALI
2018
Il saggio analizza la tutela previdenziale e assistenziale di cui godono gli immigrati regolarmente soggiornanti in Italia alla luce dell’ordinamento internazionale, di quello europeo, e dei princìpi costituzionali. Nonostante le fonti «multilivello» sanciscano una tendenziale parità di trattamento tra cives e non cives, le legislazioni statali e regionali restringono la platea dei migranti beneficiari delle prestazioni soprattutto assistenziali. Tale orientamento restrittivo è in parte controbilanciato, sia dalla giurisprudenza di merito e costituzionale alla luce dei princìpi di ragionevolezza e non discriminazione, sia dall’intervento della contrattazione collettiva. The present work ana…
A compliant visco-plastic particle contact model based on differential variational inequalities
2013
This work describes an approach to simulate contacts between threedimensional shapes with compliance and damping using the framework of the differential variational inequality theory. Within the context of nonsmooth dynamics, we introduce an extension to the classical set-valued model for frictional contacts between rigid bodies, allowing contacts to experience local compliance, viscosity, and plasticization. Different types of yield surfaces can be defined for various types of contact, a versatile approach that contains the classic dry Coulomb friction as a special case. The resulting problem is a differential variational inequality that can be solved, at each integration time step, as a v…