Taller workers earn on average higher salaries. Recent research has proposed cognitive abilities and social skills as explanations for the height-wage premium. Another possible mechanism, employer discrimination, has found little support. In this paper, we provide some evidence in favor of the...

While uncertainty abounds in almost any decision on investment in schooling, it is mostly ignored in research and virtually absent in labour economics text books. This paper documents the scope for risk, discusses the tough disentanglement of heterogeneity and risk, surveys the analytical...

This study investigates how the first childbirth affects the wage processes of highly attached women. We estimate a flexible fixed effects wage regression model extended with post-birth fixed effects by the control function approach. Register data on West Germany are used and we exploit the...

This study is the first to estimate mothers’ marginal willingness to pay (MWP) for job amenities directly. Its identification strategy relies on German maternity leave length. The key aspect of the maternal leave framework is that mothers can decide whether and when to return to their...

Recently, a voluminous literature estimating the taxable income elasticity has emerged as an important field in empirical public economics. However, to a large extent it is still unknown how the hourly wage rate, an important component of taxable income, reacts to changes in marginal tax rates....

We study the impact of graduating in a recession in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. in a rigid labor market. In the presence of a high minimum wage, a typical recession hardly influences the hourly wage of low educated men, but reduces working time and earnings by about 4.5% up to twelve years after...

This paper presents the properties of optimal piecewise linear tax systems for two-earner households, based on joint and individual incomes respectively. A key contribution is the analysis of the interaction between second earner wage differences, variation in the price of child care and...

Using the New Immigrant Survey, we investigate the impact of immigrant women’s own labor supply prior to migrating and female labor supply in their source country on their labor supply and wages in the US. Women migrating from higher female labor supply countries work more in the US. Most of...

We study innovation contests with asymmetric information and identical contestants, where contestants’ efforts and innate abilities generate inventions of varying qualities. The designer offers a reward to the contestant achieving the highest quality and receives the revenue generated by the...

We empirically test the relationship between hiring discrimination and labour market tightness at the level of the occupation. To this end, we conduct a correspondence test in the youth labour market. In line with theoretical expectations, we find that, compared to natives, candidates with a...