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...

We study the returns to apprenticeship and vocational training for three early labor market outcomes all measured at age 25 for East and West German youths: non-employment (i.e., unemployment or out of the labor force), permanent fulltime employment, and wages. We find strong positive effects of...

What are the economic returns to education in Australia? Using data from the 2018- 2022 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, and taking account of existing estimates of ability bias and social returns to schooling, I estimate the economic return to various...

Previous empirical studies on the effect of age on productivity and wages find contradicting results. Some studies find that if workers grow older there is an increasing gap between productivity and wages, i.e. wages increase with age while productivity does not or does not increase at the same...

In 2004, a section was added to the German Protection against Dismissal Act, establishing a new procedure to dismiss an employee, given a predetermined severance payment. Most legal scholars presume the change to be without impact, while a minority of experts claims it to be either beneficial or...

We investigate the role of workers' and managerial experience as a determinant of firm innovation and productivity in a sample of Italian manufacturing firms. A high share of temporary - thus un-experienced - workers is associated to low innovation and productivity. The effect of managerial...

We assess whether public sector employees have a stronger inclination to serve others and are more risk averse than employees in the private sector. A unique feature of our study is that we use revealed rather than stated preferences data. Respondents of a large-scale survey were offered a...

There is ample empirical evidence indicating that a substantial fraction of the population exhibits social preferences. Recent work also shows that social preferences influence the effectiveness of incentives in labor relations. Hence when making contracting decisions, employers should take into...

We build an analytically and computationally tractable stochastic equilibrium model of unemployment in heterogeneous labor markets. Facing search frictions within markets and reallocation frictions between markets, workers endogenously separate from employment and endogenously reallocate between...

This paper provides a review of the recent literature on how incentives in unemployment insurance (UI) can be improved. We are particularly concerned with three instruments, viz. the duration of benefit payments (or more generally the time sequencing of benefits), monitoring in conjunction with...