Using the NLSY data set, this paper formulates and then empirically estimates the production processes for social, motivational and cognitive skills during early childhood development and the long-term effects of these skills on learning and life-time earnings of an individual. Using these...

This paper is part of a project that attempts to reveal the way labour market institutions, human capital and labour productivity are interconnected. First we discuss two approaches in the human capital theory, stressing some difficulties that could be solved if the approaches are combined. It...

Due to a tax law implemented in 1998, Dutch employers can claim an extra tax deduction when they train employees aged 40 years or older. This causes a discontinuity in a firm's cost of training an employee. We exploit this discontinuity to identify two effects: the effect of the tax deduction on...

The paper proposes an alternative methodology for testing signalling hypothesis based on chances to get a job in a particular class of the job market. The individuals are ranked and matched by an external mechanism, based on preferences of employers in respect to actual observable and perceived...

Econometric simulations provide no evidence that families in West Virginia encouraged sons to drop out of high school in order to earn income as coal miners, at the net expense of later income that they would have earned with more education. Estimates of the typical family's subjective rate of...

We evaluate the effect of the federal students’ financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates into higher education by exploiting the exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in the repayment regulations. Supported students had to repay the full loan until 1990....

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the relationship between social capital and labour productivity in small and medium enterprises in Italy. By means of structural equations models, the analysis investigates the effect of different aspects of the multifaceted concept of social...

Religious participation is much more widespread in the United States than in Europe, while Europeans tend to view sects more suspiciously than Americans. We propose an explanation for these patterns without assuming differences in preferences or market fundamentals. Religious markets may have...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the relationship between social capital and labour productivity in small and medium enterprises in Italy. By means of structural equations models, the analysis investigates the effect of different aspects of the multifaceted concept of social...

In this paper, we study the return to human capital variables for wages of workers observed in Tunisian matched worker-firm data in 1999. This tells us how returns to human capital in a Less Developed Country like Tunisia differ from the industrial countries usually studied with matched data. We...