How skills acquired in vocational education and training (VET) affect wages and employment is not clear. We develop and estimate a search and matching model for workers with a VET degree. Workers differ in interpersonal, cognitive and manual skills, while firms require and value different...

We develop novel measures of early-career skills that are more detailed, comprehensive, and labor-market-relevant than existing skill proxies. We exploit that skill requirements of apprenticeships in Germany are codified in state-approved, nationally standardized apprenticeship plans. These...

We provide a new explanation for why firms pay for general training in a competitive labor market. If firms are unable to tailor individual wages to ability, for informational or institutional reasons, they will pay for general training in order to attract better quality workers. The market...

This paper examines the role of international trade for job polarization, the phenomenon in which employment for high- and low-wage occupations increases but mid-wage occupations decline. With employer-employee matched data on virtually all workers and firms in Denmark between 1999 and 2009, we...

In this empirical paper, I use the 1996 wave of the ECHP dataset to investigate the relationship between measures of wage compression and training incidence in 11 European countries. After controlling for individual factors and country specific institutional differences, I find evidence of a...

Workers will not pay for general on-the-job training if contracts are not enforceable. Firms may if there are mobility frictions. Private information about worker productivities, however, prevents workers who quit receiving their marginal products elsewhere. Their new employers then receive...

Comparing cohorts born between 1951 and 1994, we document and interpret changes in the wage differential among graduates from secondary education with a vocational and a general curriculum.. The wage gap initially increased and then decreased. We find that these changes cannot be attributed to...

A well-established stylised fact is that employer provided job-related training raises productivity and wages. Using UK data, we further find that job-related training is positively related to subsidies aimed at reducing training costs for employers. We also find that there is a positive, albeit...

Multinational affiliates are more productive than domestic firms, so how do they affect a host country through the labor market? We use data for Norway to show that the labor market is characterized by a job ladder, with multinationals on the upper rungs. We calibrate a general equilibrium job...

This paper examines the labor market adjustments to four automation technologies (i.e. robots, communication technology, information technology, and software/database) in 227 regions across 22 European countries from 1995 to 2017. By constructing a measure of technology penetration, we estimate...