Even in OECD countries, where an increasing proportion of the workforce has a university degree, the value of basic skills in literacy and numeracy remains high. Indeed, in some countries the return for such skills, in the form of higher wages, is sufficiently large to suggest that they are in...

Policymakers in many OECD countries are increasingly concerned about high and rising inequality. Much of the evidence (as far back as Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) points to the importance of skills in tackling wage inequality. Yet a recent strand of the research argues that (cognitive)...

In this paper we examine a range of postsecondary education and labor market outcomes, with a particular focus on minorities and/or disadvantaged workers. We use administrative data from the state of Florida, where postsecondary student records have been linked to UI earnings data and also to...

Overqualification signals a mismatch between jobs' educational requirements and workers' qualifications implying potential productivity losses at the macro and the micro level. This study explores how the family background of German graduates affects the probability to hold a job that does not...

Private tutoring is playing an increasingly significant role in the education of many teenagers and children: In 2013, a total of 18 percent of students at the secondary level (approximately ages 10-17) worked with paid tutors; among students at the primary level (approximately ages 6-10), this...

Economic inequality and poverty have persisted in Latin America despite important changes in political and policy regimes. This paper explores the relationship between various human capital programs aimed to reduced poverty and how improvements of those in poverty in the left tail of the earning...

Common proxies, such as years of education, have been shown to be ineffective at capturing cross-country differences in skills acquisition, as well as the role they play in the labor market. A large body of research shows that direct measures of skills, in particular cognitive and...

Technological change causes three consequences: it guarantees economic growth, it requires employees to acquire more skills and human capital, and it increases inequality if employees are not capable adapting to new technologies. The second consequence makes it almost necessary for employees to...