Abstract
The US labor market has become increasingly polarized both in terms of jobs and wages, and the routinization explanation is well established for these trends. Recent papers have found job polarization patterns also in Europe, while few evidence is available for wages. The goal of the paper is to investigate the dynamics of unconditional and conditional—on technology—wages in Europe, using industry (EU KLEMS) data. As for unconditional wages, there are no wage polarization trends at work, as the wage structure is broadly constant over time. For the conditional polarization, we investigate the impact of ICT intensity on wages and hours worked by three skill groups by education levels. Our analysis does not provide evidence supporting the conditional polarization of wages, while we detect job polarization trends.
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Notes
- 1.
Tradable industries are: electrical and optical equipment; pulp, paper, paper products, printing and publishing; transport equipment; machinery, nec; chemical, rubber, plastic products; wood and products of wood and cork; basic metals and fabricated metal products; non-metallic mineral products; textiles, textile products, leather and footwear; food products; agriculture, hunting, forestry, and fishing.
- 2.
Wages are expressed in real US dollars.
- 3.
We include USA and Japan for sake of comparison. These countries however are not considered in the econometric analysis.
- 4.
All findings are robust to the inclusion of 1980 level of value added, ICT, and non ICT capital. In the interest of space, we do no report the results of this robustness check here.
References
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Acknowledgments
We thank Carlo Dell’Aringa, Nicole Fortin, Thomas Lemieux, Marco Leonardi, Elisabetta Magnani, Raul Ramos, for their suggestions, and the participants to seminars held at Cattolica University (MILLS Seminar, Milan), OFCE-Science Po (POLHIA meeting, Paris), CeLEG-Luiss (Rome), Padova, ECINEQ conference (Catania, 2011), AIEL conference (Milan, 2011), SIE conference (Rome), Royal Economic Society (Cambridge, 2012), Barcelona (UB), Cagliari, Napoli Partenope.
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Naticchioni, P., Ragusa, G. (2014). Information Technology and Labor Market Polarization in Europe. In: Paganetto, L. (eds) Wealth, Income Inequalities, and Demography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05909-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05909-9_6
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