 Wage Premia and Skill Upgrading in Italy: Why didn’t the Hound Bark?Paolo Manasse, Luca Stanca and Alessandro Turrini No 204, Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University Abstract: This paper presents firm level evidence on the change of non-manual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides offsetting disaggregate forces. First, while technical progress raises the relative demand for skilled labor within firms, demand changes associated with exports reduce the relative demand for skills. Second, within the class of non-manual workers, wage premia and employment shares of executives rise substantially, whereas those of clerks fall in a similar proportion. We also find that the export status of firms plays a key role in explaining labor market dynamics, as exporters account for most of both demand-related and technology-related shifts. Overall, our results for Italy question the general validity of the conventional view that emphasizes the role of labor market institutions, as opposed to trade and technology, in determining wage and employment dynamics in continental Europe. References: Add references at CitEc Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:igi:igierp:204 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University via Rontgen, 1 - 20136 Milano (Italy). |
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