This study examines the causal link between individuals' occupational knowledge, educational choices, and labor market outcomes. We proxy occupational knowledge with mandatory visits to job information centers (JICs) in Germany while still attending school. Exogenous variation in the location...

This paper studies the causal effect of student internship experience on labor market choices and wages later in life. We use variation in the introduction and abolishment of mandatory internships at German universities as an instrument for completing an internship while attending university....

This paper documents the evolution of the experience-earnings profiles of private employees in Italy over the first six years of working career across three birth cohorts (1965-1969, 1970- 1974, 1975-1979). We explore the average trends and disentangle how the patterns vary according to...

How does measured performance at university affect labor market outcomes? We show that degree class - a coarse measure of student performance used in the UK - causally affects graduates' industry and hence expected wages. To control for unobserved ability, we employ a regression discontinuity...

This paper uses graduate survey data and econometric methods to estimate the incidence and wage/job satisfaction effects of over-education and overskilling among immigrants graduating from EU 15 based universities in 2005. Female immigrants with shorter durations of domicile were found to have a...

This paper uses data from the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey, a new international dataset of adult workers in 28 EU countries, to decompose the wage penalty of overeducated workers. The ESJ survey allows for integration of a rich, previously unavailable, set of factors in the...

This paper investigates whether and in what sense the west German wage structure has been "rigid" in the 1990s. To test the hypothesis that a rigid wage structure has been responsible for rising low-skilled unemployment, I propose a methodology which makes less restrictive identifying...

The dramatic change in economic conditions in Ireland over the last 10 years provides an opportunity to examine the impact of large macroeconomic shocks on inequality. We analyse wage inequality in Ireland from the height of an economic boom, through a very deep recession, to the start of a...

Mismatch of educational skills in the labor market is an emerging topic in the field of labor economics, partly due to its link to labor productivity. This is the first application of this question to New Zealand data. In this paper we examine the incidence of educational mismatch and its...

We model educational investment and labor supply in a competitive economy with home and market production. Heterogeneous workers are assumed to have different productivities both at home and in the workplace. We investigate the degree to which there is under-investment in human capital, and...