High-skilled Workers Research Articles

How Do COVID-19 Vaccine Policies Affect the Young Working Class in the Philippines?

Dubbed the "inequality virus", coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has unveiled and magnified many of the global society's long-standing inequalities and health inequities. This work brings together the phenomena of increased inequality and health inequities felt by the poor and young working class of the Philippines and how they interact negatively with existing vaccine policies. The poor and the young were more likely to have experienced employment disruptions with limited access to technologies that allowed for teleworking. Informal economy workers suffered from diminished labor protection and draconian lockdowns. Disadvantaged areas persistently dealt with limited health resources, and the working class was disproportionately vulnerable to COVID-19 infection. Utilitarian vaccine policies such as mandatory vaccination and the prioritization scheme negatively interacted with these COVID-induced inequalities and health inequities. While the young working class was more likely to be unemployed, mandatory vaccine policy required that they get vaccinated before seeking re-employment. However, the prioritization scheme adopted by the government failed to target them as a priority. This left them in a vulnerable state of prolonged unemployment while on standby for better supply and improved infrastructure for vaccine rollout. Future prospects in terms of economic recovery and health equity will be affected by issues such as potential increased taxation, the rapidly digitalizing labor market that is evolving to favor highly-skilled workers, and the staging of universal healthcare in the country.

Low-Skill Products by High-Skill Workers: The Distributive Effects of Trade in Emerging and Developing Countries

In developing countries, trade is increasingly associated with greater returns to high-skilled labor and rising inequality. These empirical patterns are at odds with canonical models of trade in the developing world. What does this mean for the political economy of trade in these countries? We argue that although developing countries have a comparative advantage in low-skill products, these are produced by workers that are relatively high-skilled compared to their peers. Trade and global production benefit relatively skilled workers, particularly those exposed to exports and inward foreign direct investment in manufacturing. Our argument offers insight into why relatively skilled workers are most supportive of free trade and why inequality is rising in developing countries. We examine micro- and macro-level implications of our argument using cross-national survey data on policy preferences and aggregate data on trade and inequality. The findings have important implications for the political economy of trade and global production in developing countries.

Robots, skills and temporary jobs: evidence from six European countries

ABSTRACT In our analysis of the impact of robot adoption on the use of flexible contracts in six European countries, we find that control for the type of innovation model that is dominant in an industry is crucial. In a ‘high knowledge cumulativeness’ innovation regime, robot adoption reduces the probability that high-skilled workers will receive temporary contracts, while no significant effect has been found for medium- and low-skilled workers. The rationale is: In a high cumulativeness regime, innovation depends on a firm’s internal knowledge sources, and high-skilled (rather than medium- and low-skilled) workers are crucial carriers of knowledge. The situation is different in ‘low-cumulativeness’ regimes. In the latter, firms are primarily using externally acquired knowledge in their innovation process. This makes workers more easily interchangeable and robot adoption significantly increases the probability to get temporary jobs for both medium- and high-skilled workers, but leaves low-skilled workers unaffected.

The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program by Pallavi Banerjee (review)

The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program by Pallavi Banerjee (review)

Air Quality, High-Skilled Worker Productivity and Adaptation: Evidence from Github

Air Quality, High-Skilled Worker Productivity and Adaptation: Evidence from Github

Mediation of lifestyle-associated variables on the association between occupation and incident cardiovascular disease

The main aim was to examine the association between occupational groups and incident cardiovascular disease (CVD), and to which extent associations are mediated by lifestyle-associated variables (cardiorespiratory fitness, smoking, BMI, exercise, and diet). A total of 304,702 participants (mean age 42.5 yrs., 47% women), who performed a health profile assessment in Sweden between 1982 and 2019, were included in the analyses. CVD incidence was obtained from national registers. All participants were free from CVD prior to the health profile assessment. Occupational group was defined using the Swedish Standard Classification of Occupations and analyzed separately (13 different occupational groups) as well as after aggregation into four occupational groups (white-collar high-skilled, white-collar low-skilled, blue-collar high-skilled and blue-collar low-skilled). Cardiorespiratory fitness, BMI, exercise, smoking, and diet were included as mediators and analyzed separately in single models and simultaneously in one multiple mediation model. All mediation analyses were adjusted for sex, age, length of education and calendar time. White-collar high-skilled was set as reference in all analyses. Blue-collar and low-skilled occupation had a higher risk of incident CVD compared to the reference. Cardiorespiratory fitness, BMI, exercise, smoking, and diet mediated 48% to 54% of the associations between reference and the other aggregated occupational groups. In the single model, the strongest mediators were cardiorespiratory fitness, smoking and BMI. In conclusion, blue-collar and low-skilled occupations had a significantly higher risk for incident CVD compared to white-collar high-skilled workers, with the association mediated to a large extent by variation in lifestyle-associated variables.

Does ICT affect the demand for vocationally educated workers?

AbstractThis paper examines the effect of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the demand for workers in Switzerland. We compare the hypotheses that an increase in ICT leads to upskilling or job polarization and investigate their implications for countries where vocational education and training (VET) is the most widespread education program at the upper secondary level. Using data from a large employer–employee survey, we create a novel measure of ICT based on the percentage of ICT workers within firms. This measure allows us to assess the impact of ICT on the educational composition of the workforce by exploiting variation over time. We find that ICT has an upskilling effect from 1996 to 2018: ICT decreases the demand for low-skilled workers while increasing the demand for high-skilled workers, especially those with a tertiary vocational education. These results strongly suggest that VET is a valid alternative to a strictly academic education, because workers with a tertiary VET degree are as good, or better, at adjusting to technological change as workers with a tertiary academic education.

Labor Skill, Trade and Capital Intensity, and the Fall of Manufacturing Real Wages: Panel Evidence from Mexican Industries

Abstract The paper studies the fall in manufacturing real wages that took place in Mexico after the China shock of 2001. It shows, first, that the wage reductions reflected a significant transmission of the China shock, plus a weak link between labor-productivity and real-wage growth; and second, that the weight of these two factors was conditioned by the skill level of workers and the trade and capital intensity of industries in Mexico. Thus, while the China shock hit harder medium and high-skilled workers in capital-intensive industries, the weak link between productivity and wage growth affected more the low-skilled in trade-intensive industries. Results come from the estimation of wage equations by skill level for an annual panel of 20 manufacturing industries at NAICS three-digit level, for different periods but focusing on 1996–2017 (the NAFTA period) and 2003–2017 (the post-China shock period).

Effects of New Technologies on Work: The Case of Additive Manufacturing

The authors study the effects on work of additive manufacturing (AM), an emerging technology that may replace significant segments of traditional manufacturing (TM). Compared to TM, AM is more integrated and offers greater flexibility in design, materials, and customizability; thus, it should entail more demanding tasks and higher skill levels. The authors analyze vacancies for AM and TM workers, focusing on plants that posted vacancies in both technologies to control for factors that may affect the content of job postings. Findings show that AM jobs are more complex (with more non-routine analytic and less routine cognitive content) in comparison to TM jobs, and AM jobs require more high-level technical skills and more reasoning skills. The relative differences are larger for lower-skill workers (operators) than for high-skill workers (engineers). The authors conclude that AM is an upskilling technology that is skill biased in favor of low-skill workers and therefore reduces the skill gap.

Dual returns to experience

In this paper we study how labor market duality affects human capital accumulation and wage trajectories of young workers. Using rich administrative data for Spain, we follow workers since their entry into the labor market to measure experience accumulated under different contractual arrangements and we estimate their wage returns. We document lower returns to experience accumulated in fixed-term contracts compared to permanent contracts and show that this difference is neither due to unobserved firm heterogeneity nor match quality. Instead, we provide evidence that the gap in returns is due to lower human capital accumulation while working under fixed-term contracts. In line with skill-learning complementarity. our results suggest that the widespread use of fixed-term work arrangements reduces skill acquisition of high-skilled workers, holding back life-cycle wage growth by up to 16 percentage points after 15 years since labor market entry.

Don't shoot yourself in the foot! A (real-effort task) experiment on income redistribution and voting

This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment that investigates the Meltzer–Richard model of equilibrium tax rates in which individuals are either low or high skilled workers and face a real-effort task that includes leisure at the work place. We find that a large proportion of low-skilled workers vote for the lowest tax rate (the one that gives them the lowest payoff), especially when the alternative tax rate is very high. However, this proportion is significantly reduced in treatments in which the subjects are given extra information about how the tax operates in redistributing income. This result suggests that the lack of information about the role of taxes in income redistribution may be an important factor in explaining the counter-intuitive voting behavior of low-income voters over income redistribution. We also find some support that the prospect of upward mobility and the belief in the negative effect of taxes on productivity make low-income voters support low tax rates, especially when the alternative tax rate is very high.

Productivity gains from migration: Evidence from inventors

This paper studies the relationship between migration and the productivity of high-skilled workers, as captured by inventors of international patent applications. Using machine learning techniques to uniquely identify inventors across patents, we are able to track the migration patterns of nearly one million individual inventors across countries. Migrant inventors account for more than nine percent of inventors in our sample. The econometric analysis seeks to explain the recurring finding in the literature that migrant inventors are more productive than non-migrant inventors. We find evidence that migrant inventors become about twenty-three percent more productive after having migrated. The disambiguated inventor data are openly available.

Essays on the complementarities between workers’ education, firms’ organization, and digitalization

ABSTRACT The aim of this dissertation is to assess the role of vocational and professional education and training (VPET) in determining firm productivity and employment growth compared to other input factors. To do this, this thesis investigates the complementarities between VPET and other production factors, especially digitalisation in the form of information and communication technologies (ICT). The results suggest that at firm level workers with an upper-secondary VET education are complementary to workers with a tertiary academic education, while workers with no post-compulsory education are complementary to workers with a tertiary professional education. The results further suggest that skilled workers benefit more than other workers do from the introduction of firms’ organisational practices. With regard to new technologies, this thesis shows that the use information technologies is particularly beneficial for workers with a tertiary vocational education, while communication technologies are especially complementary to workers with a tertiary academic education. Finally, analyses at labour market level suggest that ICT had an upskilling effect over the Switzerland, meaning that ICT decreases the demand for low-skilled workers, while it increases the demand for high-skilled workers, especially workers with a tertiary vocational education. The findings contained in this thesis enable evidence-based recommendations for policymakers, professional associations, and firms.

The fall of the labor income share: The role of technological change and hiring frictions

Documenting an average drop of the labor share of eight percentage points for eight European countries and the US between 1980 and 2007, we analyze the role of technological progress and labor market frictions. According to our results, while capital-labor substitution in general was not crucial, Information Communication Technology (ICT) explains more than half of the decline in the labor share, given an estimated elasticity of substitution with the labor input of 1.18. Considering hiring costs slightly dampens the estimated substitution effect at aggregate level. Additionally, by modeling the substitution between ICT and labor with a set of key labor market variables, we find it to be linked to both the share of routine occupations (positively) and the share of high-skill workers (negatively) with a similar strength.

Labour market and redistributive consequences of the Syrian refugees in Turkey

Abstract This paper analyses the labour market effects and redistributive consequences among natives of the arrival of the Syrian refugees in Turkey. For that, we use the quantitative spatial model developed in Loayza et al. (2021), in which low- and high-skill workers can choose where to live/work and firms within each region can choose to operate in the formal or informal sectors and, if formal, whether to hire their workers formally or not. We use the estimated model to quantify the effects of the ‘refugee shock’ on informality, wages, profits, and tax revenues across regions and the country as a whole. We show that informality increases among low-skill but decreases among high-skill workers and the skill premium increases. Wages of low-skill workers decline substantially in the most affected regions, but tax revenues and profits per worker increase. Redistributing tax revenues can substantially reduce low-skill workers’ losses in most affected areas. In addition, redistributing profits can completely revert both low- and high-skill workers’ losses, even in the most affected regions.

Population size and the job matching of college graduates

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between a region’s population size and the match of college-educated workers to jobs that require a degree. Results show a positive relationship between degree match and county population size in the United States, with a 100,000-person increase in population associated with a 1.3-percentage point increase in the likelihood of a match. The analysis uses a person’s grade point average in college to account for the potential sorting of higher-skilled workers into larger urban areas and the dataset has individuals across a wide range of regions from small rural areas to big cities.

Innovation Districts and Community Building: An Effective Strategy for Community Economic Development?

Innovation districts are being advocated for their potential to create or revitalize communities, produce neighborhoods with housing near work, and benefit surrounding communities by creating jobs for a wide range of skill sets. However, these aspirations are often mismatched with the application of innovation districts. Analyzing four innovation districts (Boston, Detroit, St. Louis, and San Diego), we demonstrate how the direction of innovation district development determines whether community goals are realized. Promoting innovation involves prioritizing high-skilled workers. When real estate development takes center stage, market demands become the focus. The construction of high-end housing, entertainment, and retail amenities may leave affordable housing options for lower-skilled workers as secondary considerations. Surging real estate prices within and around an innovation district can eventually push out long-standing residents, further negating the innovation district as a space for a diversity of people, ages, resources, and amenities.

Spatial Polarisation*

Abstract We document the emergence of spatial polarisation in the United States during the 1980–2008 period. This phenomenon is characterised by stronger employment polarisation in larger cities, both at the occupational and the worker levels. We quantitatively evaluate the role of technology in generating these patterns by constructing and calibrating a spatial equilibrium model. We find that faster skill-biased technological change in larger cities can account for a substantial fraction of spatial polarisation in the United States. Counterfactual exercises suggest that the differential increase in the share of low-skilled workers across city size is due mainly to the large demand by high-skilled workers for low-skilled services and, to a smaller extent, to the higher complementarity between low- and high-skilled workers in production relative to middle-skilled workers.

ICT, human capital and productivity in Chinese cities

This study uses a rich city-level dataset to analyse the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT) and productivity performance in China during 2003–2016. It is shown that ICT positively contributes to Chinese cities’ productivity in conjunction with other growth determinants, such as human capital, foreign direct investment (FDI), infrastructure development, financial market development, and research and development investment. An identifiable amplified effect is detected when ICT exceeds certain threshold in Chinese cities. This threshold level is reached in over a half of Chinese cities particularly cities in coastal regions. Finally, ICT is found to substitute human capital in China’s context. Since the average education level in Chinese cities is low, the finding is in line with the argument that ICT only improves productivity of high-skilled workers but worsens that of the low-skilled ones.

Assessing selection patterns and wage differentials of high-skilled migrants. Evidence from Italian graduates working abroad.

This paper aims at investigating the phenomenon of graduates' migration from an OECD country at a microeconomic level to offer insight into the scholarly debate on migration decisions of high-skilled workers living in a developed country. By merging data on employment conditions of Italian graduates with the results of an ad-hoc survey on Italian graduates working abroad, the paper assesses the selectivity of migration choices, the wage premium associated with migration decision on their earnings, and the determinants of the earning function for those graduates that work abroad. Results suggest a high complexity of both the selection and the earning function of high-skilled migrants coming from a developed country.