Intergenerational Mobility: Trends Across the Earnings Distribution The analysis, based on register data for Norwegian cohorts born 1950, 1955, and 1960, shows that the intergenerational earnings mobility is high. Using quantile regression, mobility is found to be lower at the lower end of the earnings distribution than at the upper end. The findings also indicate that mobility increases over t...

Wage and Occupational Assimilation by Skill Level: Migration Policy Lessons from Spain What are the migration policy lessons that can be learned from the Spanish case? Unlike countries with a large tradition of receiving immigrants, in Spain having a high-school degree does not give immigrants an advantage in terms of wage or occupational assimilation (relative to their native counterparts). Th...

For most workers, access to suitable employment is severely restricted by the fact that they look for jobs in the regional labor market rather than the global one. In this paper we analyze how macrolevel opportunities (regional market characteristics) and microlevel restrictions (the extent to which job searchers are restricted to the regional market) can help to explain the phenomenon of overe...

How Equal Are Educational Opportunities? Family Background and Student Achievement in Europe and the United States This paper estimates the effects of family-background characteristics on student performance in the US and 17 Western European school systems. Family background has strong effects both in Europe and the United States, remarkably similar in size. France and Flemish Belgium achieve t...

We re-examine the relationship between intra-industry trade and labour reallocation, using individual-level data on manufacturing worker moves in the United Kingdom. The contribution of this analysis is twofold. First, we estimate the impact of intra-industry trade on worker moves between occupations as well as between industries. Second, we run individual-level regressions that allow us to con...

A Selection-Based Theory of the Transition from Employment to Entrepreneurship: The Role of Employer Size A simple occupational choice model is used to predict that entrepreneurs who found new firms are more likely to work for small than for large firms prior to start-up. The mechanism underlying the result is heterogeneous risk aversion. The model also predicts a positive association between n...

Overskilling, Job Insecurity and Career Mobility This paper uses longitudinal data from Australia to examine the extent to which overskilling – the extent to which work-related skills and abilities are utilized in current employment – is a transitory phenomenon. The results suggest that while overskilled workers are much more likely to want to quit their current job, they are also relatively un...

We propose a framework to estimate earnings distributions and worker and firm unobserved heterogeneity on matched panel data. We introduce two models: a static model that allows for interaction effects between workers and firms, and a dynamic model that allows in addition for Markovian dynamics in earnings and mobility decisions. We establish identification in short panels. We develop a tractab...

An employer-employee panel is used to study whether the movement of workers across firms is a channel of unintended diffusion of R&D-generated knowledge. Somewhat surprisingly, hiring workers from others’ R&D labs to one’s own does not seem to be a significant spillover channel. Hiring workers previously in R&D to one’s non-R&D activities, however, boosts both productivity and profitability. Th...

This paper examines the importance of network-based intergenerational correlations in South Africa. I use longitudinal data on young South Africans to examine the covariance of children’s employment with parents’usefulness in job search. I …nd that fathers serve as useful network connections to their sons (and not daughters), but that mothers do not seem to be useful network connections. The fa...