I address the spread and wage implications of schooling mismatches, given the possible lack of synchronisation in the education system-labour market relationship. My main contribution is in studying the role of unobserved heterogeneity in the overand under-education phenomena, by drawing on a matched employer-employee panel. I find that the identification of the key parameters is made difficult...

We develop a model linking maximum damage awards available to plaintiffs in wrongful termination lawsuits, workers’ propensity to sue as a function of experience, and returns to experience. Using Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data on protected-worker discrimination complaints and labor-market data from the Current Population Survey, we examine how returns to experience among protected...

We estimate the effect of motherhood on wages using matching. We distinguish between net and direct effects. The net effect includes the total wage costs, whereas the direct represents the causal effect. Since covariates are likely affected by motherhood, the latter effect is not immediately uncovered. We therefore implement two strategies: First, we confine the analysis to consider sector-spec...

This paper provides data on the output and factor payments of new goods for every 4-digit industry in the U.S. manufacturing sector in the late 1970s and 1980s. For the entire manufacturing sector, the new goods’ average skilled-labor intensity exceeds the old goods’ by over 40%, and new goods can account for about 30% of the increase in the relative demand for skilled labor. Since new goods pr...

A simple model of discretionary worker investment in human capital is developed in which worker productivity is affected by a firm-specific match and employers bid strategically for workers. The labor market returns a share of specific capital productivity to workers without Nash bargaining power and without recourse to long-term contracts, because efficient turnover transforms a worker’s forme...

Vocational education in high schools has frequently been stigmatized as an anachronistic, dead-end path for students. We use data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 to examine claims that students on a vocational track would benefit from a more academically rigorous education. Clearly, selection bias confounds attempts to untangle the effects of academic tracking on income ...

This study uses data from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) and employs all basic traits from the Five Factor Personality Inventory – openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism – to examine the relationship between individuals’ personality and wages in the UK. The results indicate a negative linear relationship between wages and agreeableness a...

This paper revisits the important ideas proposed by Atkinson and Stiglitz’s seminal 1969 paper on technological change. After linking these ideas to the induced innovation literature of the 1960s and the more recent directed technological change literature, it explains how these three complementary but different approaches are useful in the study of a range of current research areas– though the...

Using German linked employer-employee data, this paper investigates the impact of on-the-job training on wages. The applied estimation technique was fi rst introduced by Leuven and Oosterbeek (2008). The idea is to compare wages of employees who intended to participate in training but did not do so because of a random event with wages of training participants. The estimated wage returns are sta...

This paper investigates the effects of services offshoring on wages using individual level data combined with industry information on offshoring. Our results show that services offshoring affects the real wage of low and medium skilled individuals negatively. By contrast, skilled workers benefit from services offshoring in terms of higher real wages. Hence, offshoring has contributed to a widen...