This study finds evidence of wage divergence between immigrants and natives in Germany using a country-wide household panel from 1984 to 2014. We incorporate the possibility of wage divergence into a two-period model of economic assimilation by modeling the differences in the efficiency of human...

We address the impact of education upon wage inequality by drawing on evidence from fifteen European countries, during a period ranging between 1980 and 1995. We focus on within-educational-levels wage inequality by estimating quantile regressions of Mincer equations and analysing the...

Using a Mincer-type wage function, we estimate cohort effects in the returns to education for West German workers born between 1925 and 1974. The main problem to be tackled in the specification is to separately identify cohort, experience, and possibly also age effects in the returns. For women,...

We examine the dynamic role of education and experience as determinants of wages. It is hypothesized that an employee's education is an important signal to the employer initially. Over time, the returns to schooling should decrease with labor market experience and increase with initially...

This paper investigates the transferability of human capital across countries and the contribution of imperfect human capital portability to the explanation of the immigrant-native wage gap. Using data for West Germany, our results reveal that, overall, education and labor market experience...

Register data are known for their large sample size and good data quality. The measurement accuracy of variables highly depends on their high importance for administrative processes. The education variable in the IAB employment sub-sample is an example for information that is gathered without a...

This paper establishes that individuals with an internal locus of control, i.e., who believe that reinforcement in life comes from their own actions instead of being determined by luck or destiny, earn higher wages. However, this positive effect only translates into labor income via the channel...

This paper demonstrates that locus of control, i.e. whether individuals believe that reinforcement in life comes from their own actions instead of being determined by luck or destiny, is an important predictor of the decision to obtain higher education. Furthermore, the authors find that...

In this paper, human capital investments are evaluated by assuming heterogeneous returns to schooling. We use the potential outcome approach to measure the causal effect of human capital investments on earnings as a continuous treatment effect. Empirical evidence is based on a sample of West...

The central vs. local nature of high-school exit exam systems can have important repercussions on the labor market. By increasing the informational content of grades, central exams may improve the sorting of students by productivity. To test this, we exploit the unique German setting where...