China has witnessed rapid increases in the skill premium over the last few decades. In this paper, we study the short-run effect of capital goods imports on skill premium in China. The surge in capital goods imports, which embody advanced technology, can explain the rising demand for skills in...

Financial sector wages have increased extraordinarily over the last decades. We address two potential explanations for this increase: (1) rising demand for talent and (2) firms sharing rents with their employees. Matching administrative data of Swedish workers, which include unique measures of...

In recent decades, many industrialized economies have witnessed a pattern of job polarization. While shifts in labor demand, namely routinization or offshoring, constitute conventional explanations for job polarization, there is little research on whether shifts in labor supply along the labor...

I investigate the mechanisms that drive sorting into entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial success among young individuals. I use Canadian matched owner-employeremployee data to conduct my investigation. Empirically, older entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs who have previously worked in high-wage...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...

This paper assesses the impact of a large expansion of public childcare in Germany on wage inequality. Exploiting regional variation in childcare supply over the 1990s, I show that in regions with stronger increases in childcare, wage inequality among women increased less strongly compared to...

We study how new digital technology reshapes vocational training and skill acquisition and its impact on workers’ careers. We construct a novel database of legally binding training curricula and changes therein, spanning the near universe of vocational training in Germany over five decades,...

Minimum wages generate an asymmetric pass-through of €rm shocks across workers. We establish this result leveraging employer-employee data on Italian metalmanufacturing €rms, which face di‚erent wage ƒoors that vary within occupations. In response to negative €rm productivity shocks,...

Female secondary school attendance has recently increased in Sub-Saharan Africa and so has the risk of becoming pregnant while attending school. Using panel data in Madagascar, we analyze the impact of teenage pregnancy on young women's human capital. We instrument early pregnancy with the young...

The Dunning-Kruger effect states that low performers vastly overestimate their performance while high performers more accurately assess their performance. Researchers usually interpret this empirical pattern as evidence that the low skilled are vastly overconfident while the high skilled are...