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.
A previous version of this article has been published as a chapter of Friso Schlitte’s cumulative dissertation (Regional disparities and growth in the European Union – Economic integration, convergence and skill-specific employment. IAB-Bibliothek, 333, Bielefeld: Bertelsmann, 2012).
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Notes
- 1.
Because high-skilled people are frequently associated with a relatively high mobility, the regional skill-level is crucially determined by migration. However, the consideration of inter-regional migration patterns is beyond the scope of this chapter.
- 2.
The classification has been developed by the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning. For details see URL: http://www.bbr.bund.de/raumordnung/europa/download/spesp_indicator_ description_may2000.pdf.
- 3.
For a detailed description of the Establishment History Panel see: http://fdz.iab.de/en/FDZ_Establishment_Data/Establishment_History_Panel.aspx.
- 4.
Due to changes in the statistical recording of firms’ affiliations to sectors, the information on the sector structure had to be back-dated from 1998 to earlier years. As a consequence, the data on the regional sector structure in the year prior to 1998 is only an approximation. Changes in the regional sector composition during that period might be underestimated.
- 5.
- 6.
Bachelor and master degrees have been introduced only very recently to German universities and are not an issue for the time period observed in this chapter.
- 7.
In order to check the robustness of results with respect to variation of the spatial weighting scheme we apply two different weighting schemes. The first specification of Ω is a binary spatial weights matrix such that ω ij = 1 if the largest municipalities of regions i and j are within reach of not more than 100 km to each other and ω ij = 0 otherwise. Secondly, ω ij is set to the inverse of distance between the largest municipalities of regions i and j.
- 8.
See Hoechle (2007) for more details.
- 9.
The estimation results of the other control variables are not displayed, but can be obtained from the authors upon request.
- 10.
In contrast our previous results the fixed effects estimates indicate that there is an immediate impact of high skilled labour supply in urbanised areas. However, the size of the estimated impact increases with a lag of two periods. Overall, this confirms that changes in the supply of human capital take some time to exert influence on the level of local skill segregation. Corresponding estimation results are available from the authors upon request.
- 11.
The first-stage estimation results can be obtained from the authors upon request.
- 12.
See Card (2001) for a corresponding reasoning with respect to returns to schooling.
- 13.
The results applying alternative weighting schemes can be obtained upon request from the authors.
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Acknowledgements
Financial support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) is gratefully acknowledged as part of the project “The Regional Dimension of the Qualification-Related Structural Change”.
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Böttcher, F., Niebuhr, A., Schlitte, F., Diez, J.R. (2014). The Determinants of Regional Disparities in Skill Segregation: Evidence from German Regions. In: Kourtit, K., Nijkamp, P., Stimson, R. (eds) Applied Regional Growth and Innovation Models. Advances in Spatial Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37819-5_8
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