This paper suggests that international trade, even between identical countries, can raise the relative demand for skilled labour. It shows that a simple generalization of Krugmans (1979) model of trade in differentiated products has implications for the skill premium, through economies of scale

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to respond to that threat by biasing the direction of their innovations towards skilled-labor-intensive technolo-gies. We show that this process of defensive skill-biased innovations generates an increase in wage inequalities in both regions. We then discuss suggestive empirical evidence of the existence

setting process is a consequence of a skill-biased technical change. The main contribution of the paper relies on the novel way in which unions are modelized and on the way in which they are embeded into a standard model of frictional unemployment.

Skill-biased technical change and trade integration have both been indicated to be the cause of the wide increase in wage inequality in U.S. in the last 50 years. This paper shows in a simple uni ed framework why both mechanisms can reproduce the observed pattern of wage dispersion. Intra- rm rent

manufacturing sectors for 23 countries over a decade. Econometric results provide robust evidence of the determinants of widening employment differentials in low and middle-income countries. In particular, the proposed empirical evidence indicates capital-skill complementarity as a possible source of skill-bias

Many empirical studies have shown how technological change, organisational change and globalisation can be alternatively (or jointly) seen as causes for skill bias. In this paper, first the empirical literature on these issues is discussed and compared and then some evidence on the G-7 countries

This paper examines the effect of skill-biased technological change as measured by computerization on the recent widening of U. S. educational wage differentials. An analysis of aggregate changes in the relative supplies and wages of workers by education from 1940 to 1996 indicates strong

are complements. We offer support for the hypothesis of “skill biased ” organizational change with three empirical findings. First, organizational changes reduce the demand for unskilled workers in both countries. Second, OC is negatively associated with increases in regional skill price differentials (a measure

Group (1997). They argue that there is an urgent need to address3 investment towards human resources, knowledge and skill acquisition to prevent social dispersion and polarisation from happening. Other studies on skill-biased technological change are e.g. Bound and Johnson (1992),4