Essays on employment, skills and inequality.

As a consequence of global megatrends, such as technological progress, globalisation and population ageing, employment and skills dynamics in developed countries have changed substantially over the past decades. With technology increasingly being able to substitute for workers doing routine, repetitive tasks, and these tasks becoming increasingly outsourceable, employment has been shifting from the middle of the skill (and wage) distribution to the top and bottom. This phenomenon is known in the labour economics literature as job polarisation, and has been extensively documented for the Unites States and Europe. While the impact of technological progress on total employment might be positive -at least in the short run-, these changes could have a considerable unequalising effect on the structure of the labour market. One of the key policy levers to mitigate the negative consequences of technological progress and other megatrends is skills investment. Nonetheless, skills investment alone is not enough to tackle the negative effects on society. Policy interventions in areas, such as social protection and employment protection, can further soften the consequences for people who find themselves in low quality jobs or out of work. This doctoral dissertation looks at the changing structure of the labour market, by documenting the phenomenon of job polarisation and the existence of local job multipliers. On the policy side, the role of skills in explaining international difference in wage inequality is analysed, as well as the impact of minimum wages on employment in emerging economies.status: publishe