In this paper, I study how an increase in the use of new work practices that involve multi-tasking has affected the returns to experience.  If each task in a job has a concave learning curve, then increasing the number of tasks may increase the returns to experience.  Using the Panel Study of...

While it might be expected that schooling will depend positively on the economic returns to education (ER) in the local labor market, in fact there is theoretical ambiguity about the sign of the schooling-ER relationship when households are liquidity-constrained. Whether the relationship is...

We explore the role of reciprocity in wage determination by combining experimental and survey data. The experiment is similar to Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe`s (1995) and is conducted with Ghanaian manufacturing workers. The survey relates to the same sample workers and the firms within which they...

We present an empirical analysis of the determinants of labour cost in OECD countries, with particular reference to the impact of labour market institutions from 1960 to 1994. The main contribution of the paper is to show that labour market regulations can explain a large part of labour cost...

This paper tests whether manufacturing exports pay more to educated workers in an effort to ascertain whether the productivity of human capital is raised by exports. Using a panel of matched employer-employee data from Morocco, we fail to find convincing evidence that exporters pay more to...

We investigate wage and productivity profiles in the Ghanaian Manufacturing sector using matched firm and worker data. Following Medoff and Abraham (1980, 1981), we use performance appraisal as our measure of individual productivity. Controlling for a wide range of human capital variables,...

To interpret estimates of empirical earnings functions, and to resolve sample selection problems such as tenure bias, the wage determination process must be specified. This paper shows that an earnings function can be interpreted as a wage offer in a labour market auction in which the worker...

We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries.  The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers.  It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow...

In this paper, we first present a summary of the literature dealing with the question of the existence of externalities of employer provided and funded training. Using French data, we then estimate the impact of this kind of training on wages, while paying special attention to the mobility after...

The paper examines the contentious issue of the extent of surplus labour that remains in China.  China was an extreme example of a surplus labour economy, but the rapid economic growth during the period of economic reform requires a reassessment of whether the second stage of the Lewis model...