Explaining Job Polarisation in Europe

Previous work has studied job polarization for the US, UK and Germany. The first contribution of this paper is to document the pervasiveness of the job polarisation phenomenon in industrialized economies by showing it is also happening in 16 Western-European countries. The second contribution is to offer a framework that builds on but goes beyond the canonical model first introduced by Katz and Murphy (1992) to explain job polarisation. The main conclusion is that occupation-biased technological progress and offshoring can explain an important part of job polarisation observed within as well as between industries.