This paper offers an alternative theory for the increase in unemployment and wage inequality experienced in the United States over the past two decades. In my model firms decide the composition of jobs and then match with skilled and unskilled workers. The demand for skills is endogenous and an...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. OLS estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and...

Since the early seventies, hundreds of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity. Consequently, estimates for the gender wage gap have been published for the most diverse countries at different points in time. This meta-study provides a...

Several recent studies based on 'exogenous' sources of variation in education outcomes show Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates of returns to schooling that are substantially higher than the corresponding Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates. Card (1995a) suggests that these results can be...

An important component of the long-run cost of a war is the loss of human capital, suffered by children of schooling age who receive less education because of the war. This paper shows that in the European countries involved in World War II, children who were ten years old during the conflict...

In market economies identical workers appear to receive very different wages, violating the ‘law of one price’ of Walrasian markets. It is argued in this paper that in the absence of a Walrasian auctioneer to coordinate trade: (i) wage dispersion among identical workers is very often an...

Lucas' 1988 model of the external effects of human capital formation is used as a starting point for an analysis of the impact of human capital on wages. Most empirical tests of new growth theory are based on time-series and cross-section data. This paper suggests a microeconometric approach to...

This Paper evaluates the impact of economic and legal variables on wage differentials between men and women. Since Becker (1957) economists have argued that competitive markets eliminate discrimination in the long run. On the other hand, practically all countries have enacted some sort of law...

Two very different approaches are used to explore the relation between market orientation and gender wage differentials in international data. More market orientation might be related to gender wage gaps via its effects on competition in product and labour markets and the general absence of...

This paper considers an economy where skilled and unskilled workers use different technologies. The rate of improvement of each technology is determined by a profit-maximizing R&D sector. When there is a high proportion of skilled workers in the labour-force, the market for skill-complementary...