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The dominant paradigm of world trade patterns posits two principal features. Trade between North and South arises due to traditional comparative advantage. Trade within the North, largely intra-industry trade, is based on economies of scale and product differentiation. The paradigm specifically denies an important role for endowment differences in determining North–North trade. We demonstrate that trade in factor services among countries of the North is systematically related to endowment differences and large in economic magnitude. Intra-industry trade, rather than being a puzzle for a factor endowments theory, is instead the conduit for a great deal of this factor service trade.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the importance of individual social capital characteristics in determining wages, both directly through their valuation by employers and indirectly through their impact on individual occupational choice. We find that a person’s level of sociability and care for others works through both channels to explain wage differences between social and nonsocial occupations. Additionally, expected wages in each occupation type are found to be at least as important as a person’s level of social capital in choosing a social occupation. We make use of restricted 2000 Decennial Census and 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey.

This paper uses data from the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs survey (ESJS) (Cedefop, 2014, ESJS microdata are Cedefop copyright and are reproduced with the permission of Cedefop. Further information is available at Cedefop, 2015), a new international dataset on skill mismatch of adult workers in 28 EU countries, to decompose the wage penalty of overeducated workers. The ESJ survey allows for integration of a rich set of variables in the estimation of the effect of overeducation on earnings, such as individuals’ job search motives and the skill needs of their jobs. Oaxaca decomposition techniques are employed to uncover the extent to which the earnings penalties of overeducated workers can be attributed to either (i) individual human capital attributes, (ii) job characteristics, (iii) information asymmetries, (iv) compensating job attributes, or (iv) assignment to jobs with different skill needs. Differences in human capital and job-skill requirements are important factors in explaining the wage premium. It is found that asymmetry of information accounts for a significant part of the overeducation wage penalty of tertiary education graduates, whereas job characteristics and the low skill content of their jobs can explain most of the wage gap for medium-qualified employees. Little evidence is found in favor of equilibrium theories of compensating wage differentials and career mobility. Accepting that much remains to be learned with regards to the drivers of overeducation, this paper provides evidence in support of the need for customized policy responses to tackle overeducation.

This paper examines the relationship between the gender wage gap and occupational gender segregation in Sweden. The results show that the gender wage gap varies substantially across occupations. It is small in male-dominated occupations and relatively large in female-dominated occupations. Further, as much as 30% of the overall gender wage gap in Sweden can be attributed to occupational segregation by gender. Finally, the return to work experience for women is substantially higher in male-dominated occupations than in female-dominated occupations, suggesting that the cost for work interruptions are lower in female-dominated occupations than in male-dominated occupations. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that women choose occupations in which the penalty for work interruptions is low. Thus, occupational segregation may arise because of gender differences in preferences for occupational characteristics and not necessarily because of discriminatory practices by employers.

This chapter investigates the economic performance of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) countries in Canada. The contribution of this chapter lies in its use of the fall of the Soviet Union as a natural experiment to detect possible differential labour market performances of immigrants undergoing different screening systems and affected by different push and pull factors. In short, the collapse of the former Soviet Union allows an exogenous supply change in the number and type of FSU immigrants potentially destined to enter Canada. For this purpose, Census micro-level data from the 1986, 1991, 1996 and 2001 Canadian Population Census are utilised to estimate earnings and employment outcomes for immigrants arriving from the Soviet Union and from FSU countries before and after the collapse.

The Blinder Oaxaca decomposition method for defining wage differentials (generally referred to as discrimination) from the wage equations of two groups has had a wide degree of application. However, the decomposition measures can very dramatically depending on the definition of the non-discriminatory wage chosen for comparison. This paper uses a form of extreme bounds analysis to define the limits on the measure of discrimination that can be obtained from these decompositions. A simple application is presented to demonstrate the use of the bootstrap to define the distributions of the discrimination measure.

This paper explores whether and what kind of distance can be considered a relevant factor for managers of multinational enterprises (MNEs). In the so-called era of globalization, traditional measures such as geographical, cultural or psychic distance have become less relevant or surrounded by growing ambiguity. Instead, institutional distance, governance or administrative distance have been introduced as variables in understanding success or failure of MNEs. Relative institutional distance, thereby, proves more important than absolute distance. This paper argues that further advances in international management studies critically depend on whether it is possible to, first, move the study of internationalization from ‘factors’ to ‘actors’ and, secondly, add societal relevance to managerial relevance. Now and in the future, therefore, two final dimensions of distance are increasingly relevant: stakeholder distance and normative/development distance.

The paper describes six major approaches within strategic groups research: the industrial organization perspective (the IO-view), the strategic choice perspective, the strategy types perspective, the cognitive perspective, the customer perspective, and the business definition perspective. The two most promising perspectives to make real advances in the strategic management discipline seem to be the cognitive view and the business definition perspective. The purpose of a grouping based on business definitions is to provide an insight, as objective as possible, of the industry’s substructure which also corroborates with the cognitive maps of the industry which the CEOs have in mind. From a practical point of view, the classification of firms in groups based on commonality in business definition (buyer scope, product scope, geographical scope and degree of vertical integration), allows managers to compare their own firms with comparable firms (the firms within the same group). The research concerning strategic groups in the Belgian beer brewing sector and the Belgian electrical wholesale sector is presented. The major problems within the strategic groups research are discussed.