The Swedish adult education program known as the Knowledge Lift (1997--2002) was unprecedented in its size and scope, aiming to raise the skill level of large numbers of low-skill workers. This paper evaluates the potential effects of this program on aggregate labour market outcomes. This is...

This Paper investigates whether and in what sense the west German wage structure has been ‘rigid’ in the 1990s. To test the hypothesis that a rigid wage structure has been responsible for rising low-skilled unemployment, I propose a methodology that makes less restrictive identifying...

Given the concern about restructuring and the role of insiders during the transition, we analyse the determinants of (and trade-off between) investment and wages in Slovenian firms. We find that investment behaviour is more consistent with the imperfect capital market (internal funds) hypothesis...

This Paper presents strong evidence for the concavity of wages in job and worker characteristics by adding second order terms to a Mincerian earnings function for six OECD countries. Under a standard normality assumption, this concavity cannot be attributed to unobserved components in those...

We survey the recent literature on the effects of active labour market policies on individual labour market outcomes like employment and income, for adult female individuals without work in European countries. We consider skill-training programs, monitoring and sanctions, job search assistance,...

This paper investigates the effects of services offshoring on wages using individual-level data combined with industry information on offshoring for the United Kingdom. Our results show that services offshoring affects the real wage of low- and medium-skilled individuals negatively. By contrast,...

In this paper, we propose a job assignment model allowing for a gender difference in access to jobs. Males and females compete for the same job positions. They are primarily interested in the best-paid jobs. A structural relationship of the model can be used to empirically recover the...

We explore the impact of mentoring of females and gender segregation on wages using a large longitudinal data set for Portugal. Female managers can protect and mentor female employees by paying them higher wages than male-led firms would do. We find that females can enjoy higher wages in...

Using micro data on women in the Czech Republic, we compare returns to various measures of human capital at the end of communism (1989), in mid-transition (1996) and in late/post-transition (2002). We show: dramatic increases in returns to education from 1989 to 1996 but no change from 1996 to 2002;...

This Paper presents new estimates of the impact of job tenure on wages using a new French matched worker-firm dataset. We develop an identification strategy that relies on one specific feature of the French labour laws. They stipulate that firms, when firing workers, must include as one of their...