| The present work consists of two papers. The first paper focuses on the differences in earnings and labor force status of low-skilled prime age men in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States at the end of the 20th century, and their relation to the differences in wage dispersion. In the UK and the US, where the bottom of the wage distribution is more dispersed, the inactivity rate among low-skilled men exceeds the percentage of the unemployed, whereas in France the opposite is true. This leaves the overall joblessness rate among the low-skilled in France similar to that in the US, and that in the UK about one third higher.; The analysis focuses on France, the UK and the US as three countries with different degrees of wage flexibility, with France as the least and the US as the most flexible. In the UK and the US skill-biased change in labor demand has had a negative effect on the wage of the low-skilled at the bottom of the wage distribution. With lower returns from employment, the low-skilled in the UK and the US are more likely to be inactive. I estimate the effect of the wage on the probability of being inactive, the probability of being unemployed, and the probability of being employed.; The second paper uses a labor supply and labor demand model with heterogenous types of labor in order to analyze the effect of market forces and wage flexibility on changes in the between-group variation in earnings, employment, unemployment, and inactivity in France, the UK, and the US between 1990 and 2002. The individual level data from Enquete Emploi for France, Labor Force Survey for the UK, and the March CPS for the US, are stratified by gender, age, and education to form different skill-groups. A reduced form system of three equations for wage, employment, and labor force participation, implied by the structural model, is estimated on group-level panel data. Structural parameters are recovered from the reduced form estimates using the minimum distance method. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
