Технический прогресс, международная торговля и неравенство в оплате труда

The last decades are accompanied by significant changes in the US and European labor markets, which consequently affect the distribution of wages across skills. Factor-biased technological change and international trade are often considered to be the main factors affecting wage inequality, but the extent of their impact is a subject of a heated debate. This Master's thesis consists of three linked essays (chapters/sections) studying these issues. Chapter 1 provides a cross-country analysis of trends in the skill premium and in the relative supply of high-skilled labor based on the data for 21 OECD countries over the last decades of the 20th century. One of the main empirical findings is the evidence that both US and European countries experienced skill-biased rather than unskill-biased technological change. I also develop a new modification of the Acemoglu's directed technological change model and show that such modification is helpful in explaining the skill premium patterns. To explain some additional wage inequality patterns such as decline in real wages of low-skilled labor, Chapter 2 extends the basic CES framework and analyzes the canonical model under fairly common assumptions on the production function. The main focus is on the tractable formal conditions under which improvements in factor-augmenting technology increase/ decrease the skill premium. I also propose an example of a production function with variable elasticity of substitution that helps to obviate some pitfalls encountered in a CES framework. Finally, Chapter 3 theoretically examines the implications of trade on wage inequality between high-skilled, middle-skilled and low-skilled labor, within the Helpman-Itskhoki-Redding (2010) framework. It has been found that if the elasticity of substitution between high- and middle-skilled occupations is higher than between high- and low-skilled ones, then the opening of a closed economy to trade may enhance polarization of the labor market.