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A common assertion, strongly supported by country‐specific empirical evidence, is that individual returns to investment in human capital change slowly over time. The research results reported in this paper indicate that this is not necessarily the outcome if the economy, like the Finnish one at the turn of the decade (1980/90), undergoes rapid shifts in the activity level coupled with increasing turbulence in the labour market. Not surprisingly, the changes in wage conditions are stronger within the private sector. Less expected is perhaps the finding of highly differing effects among men and women employed in the same sector.

This study uses micro-data to analyze wage formation in the Nordic countries at the regional level. Our results deviate systematically from the main conclusions drawn by Blanchflower and Oswald (1994). We do find a significant negative long-run relationship between unemployment and real wages at the regional level. However, we find no stable negative relation between wages and unemployment across regions in the Nordic labor markets once regional fixed effects are accounted for. Wage formation at the regional level is characterized by considerable persistence, but unemployment exerts no immediate influence on wages at the regional level. There is no evidence of a transitory wage curve, nor of a Phillips curve, at the regional level in the Nordic countries. The results are consistent with a theoretical model where central bargaining agents

Both academia and policymakers express a strong belief in higher average education levels exerting a narrowing impact on wage inequality in general and gender wage gaps in particular. The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize whether or not this effect extends to R&D- and export-intensive branches such as the technology industry.

In exploring the impact of individual and job-related background factors and, especially, of job-task evaluation schemes on the size and change in gender wage gaps in the technology industry, the paper applies an elaborated decomposition method based on unconditional quantile regression techniques.

While changes in standard human capital endowments can explain little, if anything, of the growth in real wages or the widening of wage dispersion among the Finnish technology industry's white-collar workers, a new job-task evaluation scheme introduced in 2002 seems to have succeeded, at least in part, to make the wage-setting process more transparent by re-allocating especially the technology industry's female white-collar workers in a way that better reflects their skills, efforts and responsibilities.

One crucial implication of this finding is that improving the standard human capital of women closer to that of men will not suffice to narrow the gender wage gap in the advanced parts of the economy and, hence, not also the overall gender wage gap. The reason is obvious: concomitant with rising average education levels, other skill aspects have received increasing attention in working life. Consequently, a conscious combination of formal and informal competencies as laid down in well-designed job-task evaluation schemes may, in many instances, offer a more powerful path for tackling the gender wage gap.

While the existing evidence on the impact of performance-related pay on gender wage gaps is still scarce but growing the authors know of no empirical studies analyzing the gender pay-gap effect of job-task evaluation systems.

This special issue of the International Journal of Manpower aims to make a contribution to broadening our limited understanding of the role and impact of employer‐provided training for low‐skilled service sector workers. It brings together seven of the papers that were presented at the international conference “Adapting Education and Training for the Enhancement of Low‐Skilled Jobs” held at Helsinki in May 2002. The papers are situated at the crossroads where three different strands of research and policymaking meet: the training of the low skilled, the system of vocational training and the role of training for the service sector. The contributions cover an interesting variety of European countries: Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Spain and the UK, with diverging levels of low‐skilled (un)employment, vocational training and service‐sector employment.

Intellectual capital, intangible assets and knowledge creation are all concepts that are strongly linked to the phenomenon of knowledge management. Yet they have only been parallel to each other. This controversy between different approaches has also resulted in vague definitions of knowledge management. This paper will critically discuss the definitions of these concepts. The analysis shows that different concepts actually focus on different angles of the topic. Based on this, a model will be built that ties all of them into a unitary entity. At the same time, this model gives a reconfigured definition of the concept of knowledge management.