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Wage Inequality, Employment Structure and Skill‐biased Change in Italy
Author(s) -
Naticchioni Paolo,
Ricci Andrea,
Rustichelli Emiliano
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
labour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.403
H-Index - 34
eISSN - 1467-9914
pISSN - 1121-7081
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9914.2008.00416.x
Subject(s) - economics , inequality , workforce , wage , quantile , wage inequality , labour economics , demographic economics , econometrics , economic growth , mathematical analysis , mathematics
. This paper investigates empirically the relation between wage inequality, employment structure, and skill‐biased change in Italy between 1993 and 2004. Applying quantile decomposition analysis, we point out that changes in wage inequality are mainly driven by a decrease in educational premia over time, whereas changes in employment structure play a negligible role. This evidence suggests that changes in wage inequality in Italy can hardly be interpreted in terms of a skill‐biased change, and the evidence is further reinforced by a set of descriptive statistics showing that the increasing educational attainments of the workforce might have been crowded out by a stable trend in the demand for skills.