The Determinants of Regional Disparities in Skill Segregation: Evidence from German Regions

Fabian Böttcher (), Annekatrin Niebuhr, Friso Schlitte () and Javier Revilla Diez
Additional contact information
Fabian Böttcher: CIMA Institut für Regionalwirtschaft GmbH
Friso Schlitte: Hamburgisches WeltWirtschaftsInstitut HWWI

Chapter Chapter 8 in Applied Regional Growth and Innovation Models, 2014, pp 173-196 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Labour markets in most highly developed countries are characterised by increasing inequalities in qualifications-specific employment prospects. Nickel and Bell (1995) for example find that the demand for high-skilled workers is steadily rising, while low-skilled employment is subject to a considerable decline in many countries of the OECD. On the one hand, this might be explained by a growing supply of skills due to the educational expansion in the 1960s and 1970s. On the other hand, it can be argued, that the increasing international division of labour together with technological and organisational change have been leading to a unilateral rise in the demand for high-skilled labour whereas the low-skilled compete increasingly with workers in low-wages countries (see Wood 1994, 2002). Furthermore, as a consequence of skill-biased technological and organisational changes more and more less qualified workers do not meet the increasing requirements of jobs on the domestic labour market (see Acemoglu 1998, 2002; Lindbeck and Snower 1996; Spitz-Oener 2006). Some authors also find evidence for a polarisation in skill-specific employment. Autor et al. (2003) hypothesise that highly standardised occupations of medium-skilled employees, such as book- and record-keeping, may be displaced more easily by technological innovations, e.g. by computer programmes, than comparatively simple and less standardised jobs, such as cleaning. Further empirical evidence for this hypothesis is provided by Manning (2004) or Goos and Manning (2007) for the UK and Spitz-Oener (2006) for Germany.

Keywords: Human Capital; Regional Disparity; Regional Labour Market; Human Capital Endowment; Segregation Measure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:adspcp:978-3-642-37819-5_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783642378195

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-37819-5_8

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Advances in Spatial Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().