"This paper investigates empirically the relation between wage inequality, employment structure, and skill-biased change in Italy between 1993 and 2004. Applying quantile decomposition analysis, we point out that changes in wage inequality are mainly driven by a decrease in educational premia over time, whereas changes in employment structure play a negligible role. This evidence suggests that changes in wage inequality in Italy can hardly be interpreted in terms of a skill-biased change, and the evidence is further reinforced by a set of descriptive statistics showing that the increasing educational attainments of the workforce might have been crowded out by a stable trend in the demand for skills."

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