Under communism, workers had their wages set according to a centrally-determined wage grid. In this paper we use new micro data on men to estimate returns to human capital under the communist wage grid and during the transition to a market economy. We use data from the Czech Republic because it...

In this paper we relate trends in the accumulation of human capital in Britain, Germany and the United States to overall production strategy and productivity trends. In the United States a strategy of standardized mass production led to high levels of labour productivity and concentration on the...