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We examine how firms adjust their labor demand to immigration policy changes resulting from intensified interior immigration enforcement. Using the temporal and geographic variation in the adoption of such policies as a source of identification, we find that firms boost their demand for low-skilled foreign-born labor under the H-2B visa program as enforcement intensifies. Furthermore, firms' increased demand for guest workers is inversely related to natives' employment in occupations where most H-2B workers are hired; however, it does not seem to alter natives' wages or work hours, nor does it seem to redistribute native labor away from those occupations.

This paper presents the influx of migrants into the elderly care sector in Poland, which, until recently, has been perceived as a country that “exports” caregivers. It describes the results of 31 individual in-depth interviews conducted with immigrant women who take care of elderly in Poland. The purpose of the study was to determine the profile of an immigrant taking up work in the elderly care sector, including the specification of their education level and competencies. It was determined that 55% of the respondents have higher education, including over 20% with a degree in nursing or physiotherapeutic education. It was established that, when analysing migrants in the care sector, it seems necessary not to divide migrants based on their education level (high- vs. low-skilled), but rather to consider the education profile as a whole (general and special profile education). Women with specialised education differ from the other migrants in regard to their better labour market position (higher remuneration, legal employment) and the scope of skill usage. The comparison of high-skilled and low-skilled workers in the care sector is very useful from the perspective of policymakers due to the fact that there is an issue of over-qualification in Poland. The article contributes to the literature, especially research dealing with brain waste, as there is theoretical and empirical gap in research on the differences between high-skilled and low-skilled migrants working in elderly care.

Low-skilled prime-age men are less likely to be employed than high-skilled prime-age men, and the differential has increased since the 1970s. I build a search model encompassing three explanations: (1) automation and trade reduced the demand for low-skilled workers; (2) health, welfare, and recreational gaming/computer technology reduced the supply of low-skilled workers; and (3) factors affecting job search, such as online job boards, reduced frictions for high-skilled workers. I find a shift in demand away from low-skilled workers was the leading cause, a shift in supply had little effect, and search frictions actually reduced employment inequality.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of immigration on the labour market outcomes of low-educated natives (i.e. residents without a university diploma). Using the labour market competition theory, which argues that the labour market effects of natives depend on the skill set of immigrants, the paper addresses whether immigrants are complementary to or substitutes for native workers.Design/methodology/approachLongitudinal matched employer–employee data on Sweden are used to estimate how low-educated natives, in regions experiencing the greatest influx of refugees from the Balkan wars, responded to this supply shock with regard to real wages, employment and job mobility between 1990 and 2003.FindingsFirst, the analysis shows that low-educated native workers respond to the arrival of immigrants with an increase in real wages. Second, although employment prospects in general worsened for low-skilled workers in most regions, this is not attributable to the regions experiencing the largest supply shock. Third, there are indications that low-skilled natives in immigration-rich regions are more likely to change workplace, particularly in combination with moving upwards in the wage distribution.Originality/valueRather than seeing an emergence of the commonly perceived displacement mechanism when an economy is subject to a supply shock, the regional findings suggest that high inflows of immigrants tend to induce a mechanism that pulls native workers upwards in the wage distribution. This is important, as the proportion of immigrants is seldom evenly distributed within a nation.

In this paper, I examine the welfare impact of migration in a general equilibrium model with endogenous worker location choice. My framework incorporates labor productivity differences across countries, worker heterogeneity in productivity across skill and nativity types, as well as country-pair specific costs of migration. In a series of experiments, I predict the migration response of workers to an expansion or contraction in the number of European Union (EU) member countries. For the case of the United Kingdom (U.K.) leaving the EU, commonly referred to as Brexit, low skilled native-born U.K. workers suffer a drop-in income, whereas high skilled workers experience an increase. This result is driven, in part, by an increase in high skilled immigration to the U.K. from outside the EU, which helps to dampen the loss in income of low skilled workers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the visibility of “low skilled” migrant workers in the agricultural and care work sectors, who have been rebranded as “essential” by receiving states in the Glo...

This study investigates the impact of low-skilled immigrants on urban labor markets in China. Using historical migration networks as an instrumental variable to overcome endogeneity problems, we find that low-skilled immigrants significantly increase local wages. Census data reveal significant occupational segregation between low-skilled immigrants and local inhabitants. Low-skilled immigrants are found to substitute for low-skilled local inhabitants but are complementary for high-skilled local inhabitants. In addition, low-skilled immigrants boost women's labor participation and wages through consumption service markets. This study's findings reveal that discrimination against low-skilled immigrants weakens the reciprocal effects among immigrants and local inhabitants and hinders urban development.

The growing number and proportion of migrant workers globally is an evolving issue in consular work. The globalisation of labour and markets, as well as rapid technological and societal development...

According to self-determination theory, employees' well-being is related to the autonomy-supportive style of a supervisor. However, the effect of supervision style on well-being remains understudied in low-skilled occupations. This study employed a mixed-method, multi-level approach to examine the impact of autonomy-supportive training (AST) on supervisors and employees and to identify factors contributing to the maintenance of supervisors' autonomy support (SAS). The quantitative phase evaluated the effect of AST on supervisory style and employees' well-being, with a sample of 44 supervisors and 240 employees in New Zealand. The qualitative phase used focus groups and interview with 15 supervisors to explore factors that could influence the maintenance of SAS. Overall, supervisors can be trained to adopt an autonomy-supportive style, but these skills can also be diluted by organisational factors such as pressures and managerial behaviour. This study contributes to autonomy-supportive style research in order to account for factors affecting the maintenance of SAS in low-skilled occupations.

This article reports on a study of occupational health and safety (OHS) challenges for temporary foreign workers (TFWs) in low- and high-skilled occupations, based on twenty-two cases drawn from a broader study in three Canadian provinces. Interviewees in construction, meat processing, hospitality, and fast food reported concerns regarding working conditions and OHS issues. They include precarious migration status affecting voice; contrasting access to social support; and mechanisms undermining regulatory effectiveness. Sources of vulnerability include closed work permits (making workers dependent on a single employer for job security and family reunification); ineffective means to ensure contractual compliance; and TFW invisibility attributable to their dispersal throughout the labor market. Violations include increased workload without an increase in pay and non-compliance with OHS and contractual rules without oversight. Positive and negative practices are discussed. Recommendations include improving migration security to preserve worker voice and facilitating communication between immigration and OHS authorities.

We study the impact of network homophily on labor market outcomes in a search‐and‐matching model with two job search channels: the formal market and social contacts. There are two worker types: low‐skilled and high‐skilled workers. The homophily level determines whether the referral networks of the two types are mixed or segregated from each other. We show that there exists an intermediate homophily level that minimizes the unemployment rate and maximizes the wages of low‐skilled workers. Complete integration does not maximize the welfare of low‐skilled workers, unless it improves their productivity. We argue that our model can explain the empirical findings on the labor market effects of the Moving‐to‐Opportunity experiment and the integration of immigrants.

A new skills-based immigration system, with a preference for the highly-skilled, is central to UK policy debates in the Brexit context, arguably responding to majority public opinion on migration. Through qualitative fieldwork with British, Polish and Romanian citizens living in two local authorities in England, this paper shows what participants understand by ‘low-skilled’ and how there is broad support of those who ‘contribute’, but are ‘controlled’ at the same time. Migrants’ narratives of downskilling also illustrate why the category of ‘low-skilled’ migration needs to be seen through a more critical lens in research and policymaking.

In an era of free movement UK employers have had ready access to a supply of labour from the European Union to fill low-skilled jobs. This has enabled them to adopt business models, operating within broader supply chains, that take advantage of this source of labour and the flexibility that many migrant workers – especially those who are new arrivals to the UK – are prepared to offer them. Drawing mainly on evidence from employers on the role of migrant workers in selected sectors with a substantial proportion of low-skilled jobs, this article explores the challenges and opportunities they face in transitioning to a new post-Brexit immigration regime.

Employment concentration among low-skilled immigrants is a well-documented phenomenon in the U.S. labor market though its temporal and spatial patterns are less well examined. With Census microdata, the authors trace detailed occupational niches from 1990 to 2010 for all immigrants, as well as Asian and Latino immigrants separately, to understand how these niches have evolved over the past two decades. Using the Herfindahl−Hirschman Index measure, the authors further capture the geographic variation in relative occupational concentration across metropolitan statistical areas and test what metropolitan-level contexts and policies help explain such differences. The authors find that metropolitan areas with larger total and immigrant populations, greater human capital, higher residential mobility, and more diverse economies have expanded low-skilled immigrants’ occupational choices. Conversely, policies such as higher minimum wages and greater union membership may, in fact, increase occupational concentration, at least for some groups.

This study examines the city-size wage premium (CSWP) for local urban hukou holders (citizens) and rural migrants by utilizing data from the Chinese Household Income Project surveys (CHIP 2002 and 2013) employing OLS and Propensity Score Matching method. Heterogeneity of skills (measured by level of education) is found to be one determinant of the city-size wage disparity. But irrespective of skills, citizens receive a higher city-size premium than the rural migrants; nevertheless, the premium received by rural migrants has increased over the past few years. Within the similar occupation and type of firm, a highly skilled citizen received a CSWP of Yuan 880.08 in 2013 (Yuan 347.48 in 2002) on average per month. Whereas, a highly skilled rural migrant received an average monthly premium of Yuan 601.71 in 2013, and an insignificant premium in 2002. The corresponding values for low skilled citizens and rural migrants in 2013 are Yuan 415.67 and 267.27 respectively. Our results establish that there has been a positive effect on rural migrants from the relaxation of policies and labour laws, and a move towards equalization within the same level of skills.

This paper investigates the disruption to global supply chains caused by COVID-19 and how such disruptions will affect the participation of Chinese businesses in those chains. The focus is on the post-COVID-19 outlook for migrant workers working in the hospitality and garment industries. It is argued that managers within global supply chains will use accounting processes to maintain profitability by cutting costs. Moreover, within corporate supply chains, wages will be driven down in an increasingly competitive labour market, especially for low-skilled workers. The findings show that COVID-19 will have an adverse effect on wages and employment and raise performance expectations.

We investigate the nexus between TV watching and the general public opinion about the impact of immigrants on the economies of destination countries using evidence from the European Social Survey. We find, as expected, that low skilled workers and less educated respondents have a more negative view, likely due to the stronger competition threat they suffer from immigrants. Second, and more surprising, time spent watching TV gives a strong and significant contribution to the negative opinions on the role of immigrants. Over-representation of negative events involving migrants and lack of migrants voice on TV are two likely rationales consistent with our findings.

This article discusses workers at two organizations: one employing disabled individuals and another employing low-skilled Mexican-American women. Workers at both organizations show positive effects...

Singapore is host to approximately 1.7 million transient migrants who either work or study in the city-state. While there has been extensive research on the conditions of low skilled or unskilled workers, little has been written about the experiences of the educated and middle class transnationally mobile workers and students and how they make a home for themselves in the city-state. Through in-depth interviews with 86 international students and educated transnationally mobile workers on their self-perceived identities, social networks, concepts of home, and media and communication use, this article looks at the strategies used by ‘foreign talent’ migrants to feel at home in Singapore. It is observed that while foreign talent migrants develop a combination of creative strategies in order to make Singapore ‘a home away from home’, being transient negatively affects their relationship with Singaporeans. The study also finds that while transient migrants develop close relationships with co-nationals as a strategy for transience, they also maintain/develop class structures while overseas. In other words, international students and white collar workers do not associate with co-nationals who are in low skilled or unskilled work. Drawing on the concept that transient migrants use their self-perceived identities to negotiate everyday life, this article argues that foreign talent migrants use their self-perceived identities to create emerging social and cultural spaces through their versions of reconstructions of home and by their (non)interactions with co-nationals and Singaporeans. In doing so, this article specifically moves away from the literature on time and temporalities which situates the temporary migrant as facing challenges overseas due to the break in their expected life course and connections to home, highlighting instead that transient migrants see their temporality not as a disruption bur rather part of their evolving life course.

This paper investigates whether the increasing “residual wage inequality” trend is related to manufacturing decline and the influx of low-skilled immigrants. There is a vast literature arguing that technological change, international trade, and institutional factors have played a significant role in the inequality trend. However, most of the trend is unexplained by observable factors. This paper attempts to “explain” the growth in the unexplained variance of wages by exploiting variation across locations (states or cities) in the United States in the local level of “residual inequality.” The evidence shows that a shrinking manufacturing sector increases inequality. In addition, an influx of low-skilled immigrants increases inequality, but this effect is concentrated in areas with a steeper manufacturing decline. Similar results are found for two alternative measures linked to increasing inequality: the increasing return to education and the decline in the employment rate of non-college men. The overall evidence suggests that the manufacturing and immigration trends have hollowed-out the overall demand for middle-skilled workers in all sectors, while increasing the supply of workers in lower skilled jobs. Both phenomena are producing downward pressure on the relative wages of workers at the low end of the income distribution.

This paper studies the labor market returns to quality of higher education for low-skilled students. Using a regression discontinuity design, we compare students who marginally pass and marginally fail the French high school exit exam from the first attempt. Threshold crossing leads to an improvement in the quality, but has no effect on the quantity, of higher education pursued. Specifically, students who marginally pass are more likely to enroll in STEM majors and universities with better peers. Further, marginally passing increases earnings by 13.6 percent at the age of 27 to 29. Our findings show that low-skilled students experience large gains from having the opportunity to access higher quality postsecondary education.

To what extent do economic concerns drive anti-migrant attitudes? Key theoretical arguments extract two central motives: increased labour market competition and the fiscal burden linked to the influx of migrants. This article provides new evidence regarding the impact of material self-interest on attitudes towards immigrants. It reports the results of a survey experiment embedded in representative surveys in 15 European countries before and after the European refugee crisis in 2014. As anticipated by the fiscal burden argument, it is found that rich natives prefer highly skilled over low-skilled migration more than low-income respondents do. Moreover, the study shows that these tax concerns among the wealthy are stronger if fiscal exposure to migration is high. No support is found for the labour market competition argument predicting that natives will be most opposed to migrants with similar skills. The results suggest that highly skilled migrants are preferred over low-skilled migrants irrespective of natives’ skill levels.

This paper explores the theme of patronage by examining how the social mobility prospects of paid domestic workers differ from other vulnerable low-skilled black and colored women in post-apartheid South Africa. The literature provides contradictory predictions about the effects of a relationship with an affluent employer on a vulnerable employed woman and her household. Using data from the 2002–8 General Household Survey, this study uses propensity score matching (PSM) to compare paid domestic workers versus employed women with similar labor market characteristics. It finds that the household members of paid domestic workers tend to have a lower likelihood of unemployment, lower unemployment duration, higher likelihood of owning assets, and lower prevalence of hunger. It is, however, important to see evidence of such benefits in the context of a complicated employment relationship and to highlight that such benefits can reflect both altruistic and self-serving employer motivations.

In recent decades, many countries have witnessed the introduction of quasi-market regulation, predominantly in the field of personal services where social enterprises (SEs) and for-profit organizations (FPOs) increasingly compete. The goal of this article is to contribute to the SE and nonprofit literature by analyzing the influence of enterprises’ missions on the quality of low-skilled jobs and to the public policy literature by assessing job quality in quasi-markets. Specifically, we investigate job quality in FPOs and two types of SEs distinguished by their missions (work-integration social enterprises and home care services organizations). This analysis is based on a set of indicators developed to capture job quality and data collected through a questionnaire submitted to 600 workers from 47 enterprises. The results indicate that the distinction between FPOs and SEs does not explain all the differences in job quality across firms: Enterprises’ missions also matter.

We estimated the impact of the minimum wage on wages, unemployment, and formal-informal sector mobility for women in the domestic-work sector in Uruguay. Applying the density-discontinuity design developed by Jales (2017), we used cross-sectional data for the period 2006-2016 from the National Household Survey and found that the minimum wage had significant effects on labor outcomes, with almost 20% of women increasing their wages to reach the minimum. This effect was observed in both the formal and informal sectors, though the latter was not covered by the policy. We also showed a decline in employment in the domestic sector as well as a significant effect on formal-informal sector mobility with negative impacts on formal employment. We present suggestive evidence those effects were offset by other labor policies undertaken in the analysis period.

This paper studies the effect of the change in occupational structure on wages for low skilled men. We develop a model of occupational choice in which workers have multi-dimensional skills that are exploited differently across different occupations. We allow for a rich specification of technological change which has heterogenous effects on different occupations and different parts of the skill distribution. We estimate the model combining four datasets: (1) O*NET, to measure skill intensity across occupations, (2) NLSY79, to identify life-cycle supply effects, (3) CPS (ORG), to estimate the evolution of skill prices and occupations over time, and (4) NLSY97 to see how the gain to specific skills has changed. We find that while changes in the occupational structure have affected wages of low skilled workers, the effect is not dramatic. First, the wages in traditional blue collar occupations have not fallen substantially relative to other occupations-a fact that we can not reconcile with a competitive model. Second, our decompositions show that changes in occupations explain only a small part of the patterns in wage levels over our time period. Price changes within occupation are far more important. Third, while we see an increase in the payoff to interpersonal skills, manual skills still remain the most important skill type for low educated males.

We estimated the impact of the minimum wage on wages, unemployment, and formal-informal sector mobility for women in the domestic-work sector in Uruguay. Applying the density-discontinuity design developed by Jales (2017), we used cross-sectional data for the period 2006–2016 from the National Household Survey and found that the minimum wage had significant effects on labor outcomes, with almost 20% of women increasing their wages to reach the minimum. This effect was observed in both the formal and informal sector, though the latter was not covered by the policy. We also showed a decline in employment in the domestic sector as well as a significant effect on formal-informal sector mobility with negative impacts on formal employment. We present suggestive evidence those effects were offset by other labor policies undertaken in the analysis period.

From the 1970s to the early 2000s, the United States experienced an epochal wave of low-skilled immigration. Since the Great Recession, however, U.S. borders have become a far less active place when it comes to the net arrival of foreign workers. The number of undocumented immigrants has declined in absolute terms, while the overall population of low-skilled, foreign-born workers has remained stable. We examine how the scale and composition of low-skilled immigration in the United States have evolved over time, and how relative income growth and demographic shifts in the Western Hemisphere have contributed to the recent immigration slowdown. Because major source countries for U.S. immigration are now seeing and will continue to see weak growth of the labor supply relative to the United States, future immigration rates of young, low-skilled workers appear unlikely to rebound, whether or not U.S. immigration policies tighten further.

What are the welfare effects of immigration on low-skilled and high-skilled natives? To address this question, we develop a general equilibrium model featuring two skill types, search frictions, wage bargaining, and a welfare state that redistributes income through unemployment benefits and the provision of public goods. Our quantitative analysis suggests that, in all 20 countries studied, immigration attenuates the effects of search frictions. The resulting gains tend to outweigh the welfare costs of redistribution. Immigration has increased native welfare in almost all countries. In two-thirds of countries, both high- and low-skilled natives have benefited from the presence of immigrants, contrary to what models without search frictions or redistribution predict. Average total welfare gains from migration are 1.25% and 1.00% for high- and low-skilled natives, respectively. (JEL: F22, J61, J64)

Using longitudinal linked employer-employee data, the author investigates the returns to being a native speaker for immigrant men in the low-skilled labor market. She compares the two main recent immigrant groups in Portugal: Brazilians, who are Portuguese native speakers, and Eastern Europeans, who are not. Findings show that both wage level and wage growth of the two groups are similar. To better understand this surprising result, the author studies two mechanisms through which language fluency may lead to higher wages: sorting across occupations and across firms. Brazilians do sort into occupations that require greater language skills; however, this does not translate into a wage premium. Considerable workplace segregation occurs in Portugal, but Brazilians are not less segregated from natives than are Eastern Europeans. Evidence in this article suggests that language skills are not a major driver of economic assimilation in the low-skilled labor market.

This article focuses on the relationship between employment protection legislation (EPL) and skill-specific unemployment risks. As a consequence of skill-biased technological progress, low- and high-skilled workers are expected to be affected differently. Moreover, the level of technological progress should moderate the relation between EPL and skill-specific unemployment risks. The analyses are based on data from the Labour Force Survey from the year 2008 and concentrate on the civilian labour force aged between 25 and 49 years in 20 European countries. The results show that stricter EPL strengthens unemployment risks between skill groups only when the level of technological progress is very advanced. In other countries, stricter EPL is related to less inequality in unemployment risks. However, there are two sides to a coin. While stricter EPL is related to lower unemployment risks for the low skilled in most countries, it leads to higher unemployment rates for the highly skilled at the same time.

The problem of poor writing skills at the postsecondary level is a large and troubling one. This study investigated the writing skills of low-skilled adults attending college developmental education courses by determining whether variables from an automated scoring system were predictive of human scores on writing quality rubrics. The human-scored measures were a holistic quality rating for a persuasive essay and an analytic quality score for a written summary. Both writing samples were based on text on psychology and sociology topics related to content taught at the introductory undergraduate level. The study is a modified replication of McNamara et al. (Written Communication, 27(1), 57–86 2010), who identified several Coh-Metrix variables from five linguistic classes that reliably predicted group membership (high versus low proficiency) using human quality scores on persuasive essays written by average-achieving college students. When discriminant analyses and ANOVAs failed to replicate the McNamara et al. (Written Communication, 27(1), 57–86 2010) findings, the current study proceeded to analyze all of the variables in the five Coh-Metrix classes. This larger analysis identified 10 variables that predicted human-scored writing proficiency. Essay and summary scores were predicted by different automated variables. Implications for instruction and future use of automated scoring to understand the writing of low-skilled adults are discussed.

Using a 2004 survey done in New York City’s Chinese community, we explore the extent to which legal status affects immigrants’ labor market performance and health status. We focus on five issues related to legal status of immigrants: wages, weekly working hours, employment location, self-rated health, and health care utilization. Our results show that undocumented immigrants are more likely to work for exceptionally long hours and are less likely to see a doctor when they get sick. However, we also find that current legal status does not have a significant effect on current health status. This work contributes to a growing literature on how legal status is linked to labor market and health consequences.

The self-service technologies (SSTs) are fast changing the conventional way of transacting business by business organisations. The rapid innovation of self-service technologies and its adoption and usages in all facets of human systems is acclaimed to be fast rendering low skilled workers jobless. The major sectors of the economy in advanced economies have reached their peaks and can no longer provide new employment due to an increase in the productivity growth rate as a result of technology advances. These SSTs have in no small measure brought about an increase in productivity growth rate, cost reduction and anincrease in the speed of service delivery to customers. This paper examines if self-service technologies truly are the cause of persistent unemployment through a study of the long term metamorphosis of the major economic sectors in advanced economies. This study revealed that the SSTs presents both risks and opportunities.

While higher wages at home reduce the incentive to emigrate by increasing the opportunity cost of working abroad, they also facilitate emigration for liquidity-constrained individuals. Our theoretical model examines the interaction between these two effects. We show that (i) the relationship between the home-country wage and emigration pressure is hump-shaped, (ii) the hump is more pronounced the lower the cost of migration, and (iii) the ratio of high to low-skilled emigrants is decreasing in the home-country wage. We test our model empirically for three different skill groups of emigrants and find strong evidence in support of the three hypotheses. The peak emigration rate for the low skilled is estimated at $4000 at 2000 PPP-adjusted prices. A rise in the annual per-capita income of the source country from $231 of the poorest economy in our sample to $4000, is associated with an increase in the emigration rate of its low-skilled workers from about 2.7% to 5.0%.

In the contemporary world, many people find themselves confused and challenged by unpredictability of life paths, labour market instability and necessary revisions to vocational careers. They may be helped by professional support institutions. For some people, seeking professional help when facing a predicament is evidence of resourcefulness. Others, however, perceive a request for help as expressive of vulnerability and a lack of self-reliance in coping with life problems. In this article, we examine 15 interviews with low-skilled and low-educated people in Poland about their experiences with educational and vocational counselling as well as the relevance they attribute to past meetings with counsellors. Concluding, we formulate recommendations for Polish educational and vocational counselling.

One of the most common applications of accessibility is in evaluating inequality in access to jobs. A vital factor to be incorporated by accessibility indicators when analyzing job accessibility is the competition for job positions by job seekers; otherwise, the results may be inaccurate or misleading. Despite efforts by researchers to develop accessibility measures that capture job competition, they fail to ensure that these measures are practical and easily interpretable and communicable, which in turn makes planners and policymakers continue to opt for more straightforward measures. In this paper we aim to fill this gap by providing a simple accessibility measure that accounts for competition effects, while remaining practical, intuitive, and highly communicable. The proposed indicator – Balancing Time – is applied to assess the inequality in job accessibility in 160 neighborhoods within the city of Rio de Janeiro, and the results are compared with the most popular indicator used in practice, the cumulative opportunities. The findings suggest that Balancing Time overcomes some of the limitations of cumulative opportunities and that it is a useful tool for planners, particularly in the cities with job opportunities concentrated in central areas. Given its simplicity, Balancing Time is especially relevant in the context of the Global South, where most transport agencies face data limitations and have low skilled technical staff.

We study the effects of low-skilled immigration on firm profits, average wages, employment, capital and total factor productivity (TFP) by combining firm-level and local labour market data from Italy. We find that low-skilled immigration increases profits by reducing average wages and total labour costs. This effect is small on average, but about ten times larger for firms operating in local labour markets with a high share of low-skilled employment than for other firms. In these areas, the substitution effects triggered by immigration reduce average wages much more than elsewhere.

We estimated the impact of the minimum wage on wages, unemployment, and formal-informal sector mobility for women in the domestic-work sector in Uruguay. Applying the dual-economy, density-discontinuity design developed by Jales (2017), we used cross-sectional data for 2006-2016 from the National Household Survey and found that the minimum wage had significant effects on labor outcomes, with almost 20% of women increasing their wages to reach the minimum. This effect was observed in both the formal and informal sector, though the latter was not covered by the policy. Our results showed a drop in employment as well as a significant effect on sector mobility with negative impacts on formality. Nevertheless, these undesired effects were offset by other labour policies undertaken in the period, by sustained economic growth, and by improvement in labor- market conditions. A novel identification strategy that is particularly suited to developing countries provides empirical evidence regarding the effects of a minimum wage on women workers in the informal sector.

Matched employee-employer data from the UK are used to analyze the wage premium to working in an innovative firm. We find that firms that are more R&D intensive pay higher wages on average, and this is particularly true for workers in some low-skilled occupations. We propose a model in which a firm's innovativeness is reflected in the degree of complementarity between workers in low-skill and high-skilled occupations, and in which non-verifiable soft skills are an important determinant of the wages of workers in low-skilled occupations. The model yields additional predictions on training, tenure and outsourcing which we also find support for in data.