This study presents credible estimates for the causal eff ect of a variation in obesity on employment. By exploring random assignment of a weight loss intervention based on monetary rewards, I provide convincing evidence that weight loss positively aff ects the employment prospects of obese women but not of obese men. Consistent with this, signifi cant eff ects of weight loss on proxy variables...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on what makes German regions grow. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal distribution. Thus, application of the threshold model to a real world case, here West Germany, shows...

We consider a Rebelo (1991) type model of endogenous growth in which the environmental quality positively affects the rate of human capital accumulation and the environmental quality itself is positively affected by human capital accumulation and is negatively affected by physical capital accumulation. We analyse the effects of taxation on the steady state equilibrium growth rate in this model....

We document that nearly half of the global decline in agricultural employment was driven by new cohorts entering labor market. A dataset policy reforms supports an interpretation these cohort effects as human capital. Using a model frictional reallocation, we conclude capital growth led to sharp supply, accounting, at fixed prices, for 40 percent decrease employment. This aggregate effect is ha...

I study how the relative efficiency of high- and low-skill labor varies across countries. Using microdata for countries at different stages development, document that differences in quantities wages are consistent with high-skill workers being relatively more productive rich exploit variation skill premia foreign-educated migrants to discriminate between two possible drivers this pattern: cross...

Online professional networking platforms are widely used and may help workers to search for obtain jobs. We run the first randomized evaluation of training work seekers join use one largest platforms, LinkedIn. Training increases end-of-program employment rate by 10 percent (7 percentage points), this effect persists at least 12 months. The available employment, platform use, job data suggest t...

Dynamic Contracts and Learning by Doing This paper studies the design of optimal contracts in dynamic environments where agents learn by doing. We derive a condition under which contracts are fully incentive compatible. A closed-form solution is obtained when agents have CARA utility. It shows that human capital accumulation strengthens the power of incentives and allows the principal to provid...

This paper examines whether the average level of human capital in a region affects the earnings of an individual residing in that region in a manner that is external to the individual’s own human capital. I find little evidence of an external effect of human capital, which suggests that human capital spillovers of the form postulated by the new growth literature are unlikely to matter much in p...

The paper investigates the relationship between human capital diversity measured in terms of occupational diversity and a rm's likelihood to innovate. The empirical analysis is based on a linked employer-employee panel dataset of German rms over the period 1998 to 2007. Despite notable di erences between service and manufacturing rms, our results clearly indicate a positive relationship between...

We analyse how progressive taxation and education subsidies affect schooling decisions when the returns to education are stochastic. We use the theory of real options to solve the problem of education choice in a dynamic stochastic model. We show that education attainment will be an increasing function of the risk associated with education. Furthermore, this result holds regardless of the degre...