Discontinuities in the employment profile are supposed to cause wage cuts since they imply an interruption in the accumulation of human capital as well as a depreciation of the human capital stock built up in the past. In this paper, we estimate the return to effective experience, taking into...

This paper examines the wage effects of different types of career interruptions. We consider the timing and duration of non-employment spells by exploiting an administrative data set of German social security accounts (IAB employment sample) supplemented with information on the employees' entire...

We exploit the crosscountry and time variation in the demographics and education structure of 11 European countries to study how cohort size has affected real earnings in Europe. When we pool the data of all countries, we find that cohort size has a negative and statistically significant effect...

We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with respect to family background. Similar to previous studies, we find sizeable...