Ethnic Dualism and Communication Costs – Explaining Segmentation and Wage Inertia

Ulf von Kalckreuth

No 593, Discussion Papers from Institut fuer Volkswirtschaftslehre und Statistik, Abteilung fuer Volkswirtschaftslehre

Abstract: What is the impact of international migration on the wage structure? Empirically, it is difficult to find any effect at all. This essay gives a new theoretical explanation for this conspicuous absence, emphasising non-convexities in the technology of individual firms due to communication costs. With high costs of coordination between workers, the labour force will segregate on the workshop level. In this case, the aggregate production technology has linear segments, and within certain bounds, additional labour input is absorbed without changing the relative factor prices. A local non-substitution theorem is derived.

JEL-codes: D24 D33 F22 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/1018/1/593.pdf

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:mnh:vpaper:1018

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Institut fuer Volkswirtschaftslehre und Statistik, Abteilung fuer Volkswirtschaftslehre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Katharina Rautenberg ().