This paper extends choice theory by allowing for the interaction between cognitive costs and social norms. The authors experimentally investigate the role of imitation and temporal decisional patterns when participants face a task which is costly in cognitive terms. They identify two main...

This paper analyzes, within a regional growth model, the impact of productive governmental policy and integration on the spatial distribution of economic activity. Integration is understood as enhancing territorial cooperation between the regions, and it describes the extent to which one region...

Nanotechnologies are expected to be the dominant general purpose technology of the next decades. Their market potential is immense and especially demand side arguments will have far reaching consequences for innovations. They may occur as increased miniaturization or via building completely new...

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....

This paper estimates the effects of offshoring on labour market inequalities between skill groups based on German industry level data from 1995 to 2007. Our main findings are the following: First, offshoring is on average biased in favour of high-skilled employees and in disfavour of low-skilled...

This paper analyses the wage premia associated with workers' occupational use of foreign languages in Germany. After eliminating time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity and other confounding factors, sizable returns of about 10 percent to applying fluent English skills are found. Returns to...

This paper substantiates the debate following Richard Florida’s suggestion to measure regional human capital by creative occupations rather than education. Consistent with Florida’s notion of creativity, it suggests a microfoundation that relates creativity to workers’ cognitive and...

This study directly assesses the impact of military work experience compared with civilian work experience in similar jobs on the subsequent chances of being hired in the civilian labour market. It does so through a field experiment in the Belgian labour market. A statistical examination of our...

The Walrasian theory of labor market equilibrium predicts that in the absence of any market frictions, workers earn a wage rate equal to their marginal productivity. However, this observation is not supported empirically for various economies. Based on the neoclassical tradition, the ratio of...

The authors use information gathered from 122 studies on the effects of high school diplomas on wages in different countries worldwide to carry out a meta-analysis that shows high school diplomas have a statistically significant effect on wages of nearly 8 percent. This effect varies whether the...