Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/124957 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 9453
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This paper studies the interlinked relationship between globalization and technological upgrading in affecting employment and wages of skilled and unskilled workers in a middle income developing country. It exploits a unique longitudinal firm‐level database that covers all manufacturing firms in Turkey over the 1992‐2001 period. Turkey is taken as an example of a developing economy that, in that period, had been technologically advancing and becoming increasingly integrated with the world market. The empirical analysis is performed at firm level within a dynamic framework using a 2+2 equations model that depicts the employment and wage trends for skilled and unskilled workers separately. In particular, the System Generalized Method of Moments (GMM‐SYS) procedure is applied to a panel dataset of about 15,000 firms. Our results confirm the theoretical expectation that developing countries face the phenomena of skill-biased technological change and skill‐enhancing trade, both leading to increasing the employment and wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers. In particular, a strong evidence of a relative skill bias emerges: both domestic and imported technologies increase the relative demand for skilled workers more than the demand for the unskilled. "Learning by exporting" also appears to have a relative skill biased impact, while FDI imply an absolute skill bias.
Subjects: 
skill‐biased technological change
international technology transfer
GMM‐SYS
JEL: 
O33
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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