We estimate a model of the joint participation and mobility along with the individuals' wage formation in France. Our model makes it possible to distinguish between unobserved person heterogeneity and state-dependence. We estimate the model using state of the art Bayesian methods employing a...

Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology shocks in a VAR with long-run restrictions....

The paper examines the implications of an important aspect of the ongoing reorganization of work – the move from occupational specialization towards multi-tasking – for centralized wage bargaining. The analysis shows how, on account of this reorganization, centralized bargaining becomes...

This paper offers a model of the interaction between composition of jobs and labour market regulation. Ex-post rent-sharing due to search frictions implies that ‘good’ jobs which have higher creation costs must pay higher wages. This wage differential distorts the composition of jobs, and in...

Under communism, workers had their wages set according to a centrally-determined wage grid. In this paper we use new micro data on men to estimate returns to human capital under the communist wage grid and during the transition to a market economy. We use data from the Czech Republic because it...

We examine the dynamic role of education and experience as determinants of wages. It is hypothesized that an employee's education is an important signal to the employer initially. Over time, the returns to schooling should decrease with labour market experience and increase with initially...

We estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings using the changes in compulsory schooling laws for secondary schools in West German states during the period from 1948 to 1970. While our research design is very similar to studies for various other countries, we find very different...

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;...

Economists have long viewed recessions as contributing to increasing inequality. This conclusion is largely based on data from a period in which inequality was increasing over time, however. This Paper examines the connection between long-run trends and cyclical variation in earnings inequality....

How valuable are the skills acquired under socialism in a market economy? This Paper throws light on this question using unique data covering the years before and during transition (1986-98) for about 3 million Hungarian wage earners. We find that returns to a year of schooling increased by 75%...