The European Social Survey data are used to analyze informal employment at the main jobin 30 countries. Overall, informality decreases from South to West to East to North. However,dependent work without contract is more prevalent in Eastern Europe than in the West,except for Ireland, the UK and...

This article puts the relationship between wage dispersion and firm productivity to an updatedtest, taking advantage of access to detailed Belgian linked employer-employee panel data.Controlling for simultaneity issues, time-invariant workplace characteristics and dynamics inthe adjustment...

The Bologna process inspired the Italian 3+2 reform of the university system whichconstitutes a big increase in the supply of college graduates. This paper is a preliminaryattempt to identify the effects of the reform on (i) the relative probability (relative to nongraduates)of employment of...

Denmark’s registry data provide accurate and complete career history data along withdetailed personal characteristics (e.g., education, gender, work experience, tenure andothers) for the population of Danish workers longitudinally. By using such data from 1992 to2002, we provide rigorous...

This paper assesses the impact of product market competition on job instability as proxied bythe use of fixed-term labor contracts. Using both worker data from the Spanish Labor ForceSurvey and firm data from the Spanish Business Strategies Survey, I show that job instabilityrises with...

In this paper we provide an overview of China’s human capital strategy and educationalachievements over the last two decades. While every one acknowledges China as aneconomic superpower, very few are aware of or realize China’s notable achievements ineducation as well as its...

Following the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT), firms are likelyto face increasing skill requirements. They may react either by training or hiring the newskills, or by a combination of both. We first show that ICT are indeed skill biased and we thenassess the relative...

We develop entrepreneurship and institutional theory to explain variation in different types ofentrepreneurship across individuals and institutional contexts. Our framework generateshypotheses about the negative impact of higher levels of corruption, weaker property rightsand especially...

Evidence about job mobility outside the U.S. is scarce and difficult to compare crossnationallybecause of non-uniform data. We document job mobility patterns of collegegraduates in their first three years in the labor market, using unique uniform data covering 11European countries and Japan....

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, thereis hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ thoseworkers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory ofskill-biased change in...