We examine the impact of public sector salary disclosure laws on university faculty salaries in Canada. The laws, which enable access to individual if they exceed specified thresholds, were introduced different provinces at times. Using detailed administrative data covering majority Canada, and an event-study research design that exploits within-province variation exposure policy across institu...

We investigate the wage return to studying economics by leveraging a policy that prevented students with low introductory grades from declaring major. Students who barely met grade point average threshold major in earned $22,000 (46 percent) higher annual early-career wages than they would have their second-choice majors. Access shifts students' preferences toward business/finance careers, and ...

A childhood intervention to improve the social skills and self-control of at-risk kindergarten boys in 1980s had positive impacts over life course: higher trust as adolescents; increased group membership, education, reduced criminality young adults; marriage employment adults. Using administrative data, we find this average yearly income by about 20 percent decreased transfers almost 40 percent...

In this paper we characterise the selection into parenthood for men and women separately and estimate effects of motherhood and fatherhood on wages. We apply propensity score matching exploiting an extensive high-quality register-based data set augmented with family background information. We estimate net effects of parenthood and find that mothers receive 7.4% lower average wages compared to n...

Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition for Tobit Models In this paper, a decomposition method for Tobit-models is derived, which allows the differences in a censored outcome variable between two groups to be decomposed into a part that is explained by differences in observed characteristics and a part attributable to differences in the estimated coefficients. The method is applied to a decomposition of t...

Regression and neural network models of wage determination are constructed where the explanatory variables include detailed information about skills. People skills, strategic skills, and IT skills all carry strong and significant wage premia; problemsolving skills (surprisingly) and physical skills (less surprisingly) do not. In contrast to the impact of school curriculum on subsequent earnings...

How Important Is Homeland Education for Refugees’ Economic Position in The Netherlands? We use data on refugees admitted to the Netherlands that include registration of education in their homeland by immigration officers. Such data are seldom available. We investigate the quality and reliability of the registrations and then use them to assess effects on refugees’ economic position during the f...

The authors use a laboratory experiment to examine the impact of relative wages on labor supply. They test the hypothesis that, ceteris paribus, making a given wage high (low) relative to other wage levels will lead to an increase (decrease) in labor supply. They find that labor supply does respond significantly to relative pay, and in the expected direction. However, when a strong enough reaso...

This paper employs the Ordinary Least Squares, Instrumental Variables and Treatment Effect models to a new dataset from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) to estimate return to four-year university education in 2008. Our estimates reveal that income premium of four-year university education is about 97 percent above that of high school education, and robust to the various est...

The German Economy is not only affected by the Unification of Germany but by a significant influx of immigrants from abroad and huge migration from East to West Germany around the date of unification. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) allows to disentangle those effects by decomposition of the Theil I (0)-Index of inequality. In addition, the paper offers insights in the t...