This paper presents a test of the educational signaling hypothesis.If employers use education as a signal in the hiring process, they will rely more on education when less is otherwise known about applicants.We nd that employers are more likely to lower educational standards when an informal,...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of school quality on performance in national exams and the career decision at age 16. We use micro data for the UK, which provides a rich set of variables on parental background, previous achievements, and community variables. We find that,...

We develop a theoretical framework to study the psychology of poverty and 'aspirations failure'. In our framework, the rich and the poor share the same preferences - and also a behavioral bias in setting aspirations. Greater downside risks imposed by poverty exacerbates the effects of this...

Using panel data of 58 developing countries for the period 1980-1998, this study shows that the responsiveness of the $2 a day poverty headcount measure to changes in mean income and inequality significantly decreases with initial inequality and the ratio poverty line over mean income - taken as...

Empirical findings that minorities typically attain lower economic status than majorities and that relatively larger minorities perform worse than smaller ones pose a challenge to economics.To explain this scale puzzle, I model an economy where the society is bifurcated into two social groups...

In the preceding paper we have seen that the top types of labor are relatively scarce in China and this raises the issue of income inequality under competition.Our main finding is that inequality would multiply indeed. Subsidiary, the nature of inequality would shift from the rural-urban divide...

Our objective is to assess personal income under perfect competition, when factors are rewarded according to their productivities, and to contrast the ensuing distribution with the status quo.Competition will yield winners and losers, both in terms of factor claims and in terms of regions or...

We analyse gender wage inequalities in Italy in the mid-1990s and in the mid-2000s. In this period important labour market developments occurred: institutional changes have loosened the use of flexible and atypical contracts; the female employment rates and educational levels have substantially...

Abstract: This paper studies the gender wage gap by educational attainment in Italy using the 1994–2001 ECHP data. We estimate wage distributions in the presence of covariates and sample selection separately for highly and low educated men and women. Then, we decompose the gender wage gap...