This article compares immigrant and native‐born male occupational distributions in Canada in the 1980s. Three questions are addressed: (1) How do immigrant and native‐born occupational distributions differ? (2) Are immigrants more occupationally mobile? and (3) How do immigrant occupations and mobility relate to characteristics used in immigrant selection? Results indicate that immigrants are more skilled, but this declines across successive cohorts. Immigrants are more occupationally mobile even long after arrival, indicating immigration may contribute to a more flexible labor force. Immigrants who are not assessed on their skills or are not fluent at arrival are less occupationally mobile.

This article examines the determinants of changes in the U.S. wage structure from 1976 to 2000. Our main empirical observation is that changes in both the level of wages and the returns to skill over this period were primarily driven by changes in the ratio of human capital to physical capital. We show that this pattern conforms extremely well to a simple model of technological adoption following a major change in technological opportunities. In contrast, we do not find much empirical support for the view that ongoing (factor‐augmenting) skill‐biased technological progress has been an important driving force over this period.

This article provides an overview of the Canadian Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, including its evolution, salient features, relative size, and knowledge about its labor market impacts. Understanding of these impacts is limited, and we conclude that an "event-study" approach is a promising way to further this knowledge. We examine the effects of the 1976 UI disentitlement of the elderly on their labor force behavior and find evidence of significant adverse selection effects. Interactions with the public pension system suggest that poverty among the elderly could be best addressed through changes in programs other than UI.

Over the last 20 years the wage-education relationships in the United States and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education compositions of employment have evolved in a parallel fashion. In this paper, we show how these patterns shed light on the nature of recent technological change and highlight the importance of taking into account movements in the ratio of human capital to physical capital when examining changes in the returns to skill. Our analysis indicates that the United States could have prevented the increase in wage inequality observed in the 1980's by a faster accumulation of physical capital.

This paper argues that several of the poor labor market outcomes observed in the Great Recession can be traced back to a change in the demand pattern for skilled workers that started with the tech bust of 2000. In particular, we show that around the year 2000, the demand for cognitive tasks underwent a reversal. In response, high-skilled workers moved down the occupational ladder and increasingly displaced lower-educated workers in less skill-intensive jobs. While these effects were present before the financial crisis of 2008, they became more obvious after jobs associated with the housing bubble disappeared.

Since 2000, US real average wages stagnated or declined while Canadian wages increased. We investigate the role of the Canadian resource boom in explaining this difference. We focus on wage spillovers to nonresource workers through a bargaining channel. We find that long-distance commuting to resource regions had substantial spillover effects on noncommuters in sending regions. Through spillovers, we account for 49% of the increase in the real mean wage in Canada between 2000 and 2012. We also find long-distance commuting effects in the United States. We conclude that long-distance commuting integrates regions, spreading benefits and costs of booms across the economy.

Does switching the composition of jobs between low-paying and high-paying industries have important effects on wages in other sectors? In this paper, we build on search and bargaining theory to clarify a key general equilibrium channel through which changes in industrial composition could have substantial effects on wages in all sectors. In this class of models, wage determination takes the form of a social interaction problem and we illustrate how the implied sectoral linkages can be empirically explored using U.S. Census data. We find that sector-level wages interact as implied by the model and that the predicted general equilibrium effects are present and substantial. We interpret our results as highlighting the relevance of search and bargaining theory for understanding the determination of wages, and we argue that the results provide support for the view that industrial composition is important for understanding wage outcomes.

Why have some countries done so much better than others over the recent past? This paper sheds light on this issue by providing a decomposition of the change in the distribution of output per worker across countries over the period 1960–1998. We find that most of the change in shape of the world distribution of income can be accounted for by a very substantial increase in the social returns to capital accumulation. In contrast, we do not find significant effects coming through changes in the effect of initial conditions or through increases in the importance of education.

The proportion of U.K. people with university degrees tripled between 1993 and 2015. However, over the same period the time trend in the college wage premium has been extraordinarily flat. We show that these patterns cannot be explained by composition changes. Instead, we present a model in which firms choose between centralized and decentralized organizational forms and demonstrate that it can explain the main patterns. We also show the model has implications that differentiate it from both the exogenous skill-biased technological change model and the endogenous invention model, and that U.K. data fit with those implications. The result is a consistent picture of the transformation of the U.K. labour market in the last two decades.

We propose and estimate a novel specification of the labor demand curve incorporating search frictions and the role of entrepreneurs in new firm creation. Using city-industry variation over four decades, we estimate the employment -wage elasticity to be -1 at the industry-city level and -0.3 at the city level. We show that the difference between these estimates likely reflects the congestion externalities predicted by the search literature. Also, holding wages constant, an increase in the local population is associated with a proportional increase in employment. These results provide indirect information about the elasticity of job creation to changes in profits.