Economic liberalization has induced a new dynamics on wage setting and employment on Mexican labor market. These changes have been caused by two related events: productive restructuring and increasing labor market flexibility. To the extent that productive restructuring has implied significant...

We utilize county-level data to explore the roles of different types of human capital accumulation in U.S. growth determination. The data includes over 3,000 cross-sectional observations and 39 demographic control variables. The large number of observations provides enough degrees of freedom to...

Human capital plays an important role in the theory of economic growth, but it has been difficult to measure this abstract concept. We survey the psychological literature on cross-cultural IQ tests, and conclude that modern intelligence tests are well-suited for measuring an important form of a...

In an environment where children's time has an economic value and employment opportunities for educated workers are scarce, parental investments in their children's education may not be driven entirely by poverty and credit constraints. We offer evidence that children's participation in child...

Due to a tax law implemented in 1998, Dutch employers can claim an extra tax deduction when they train employees aged 40 years or older. This causes a discontinuity in a firm's cost of training an employee. We exploit this discontinuity to identify two effects: the effect of the tax deduction on...

We examine how much of the observed wage dispersion among similar workers can be explained as a consequence of a lack of coordination among employers. To do this, we construct a directed search model with homogenous workers but where firms can create either good or bad jobs, aimed at either...

In this paper, we study the return to human capital variables for wages of workers observed in Tunisian matched worker-firm data in 1999. This tells us how returns to human capital in a Less Developed Country like Tunisia differ from the industrial countries usually studied with matched data. We...

I study the consequences of heterogeneity of skills for the design of an optimal unemployment insurance, using a principal-agent set-up with a risk neutral insurer and infinitely lived risk averse agents. Agents, who are characterised by different productivities or skills, are employed by firms...

Using Finnish panel data, we study how entrepreneurs differ from workers in education and income dynamics. We find that workers have higher median income in all educational groups. Without additional controls, entrepreneurs have higher average income with all but undergraduate level of...

I estimate a life cycle model of consumption choice with unemployment risk. Employed individuals face the risk of losing their job. Unemployed agents receive job random offers of different quality, which they can accept or reject. Following the loss of a job and during unemployment, an agent’s...