Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. There is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and there might be an important element of selection in who obtains an apprenticeship, and what type. To...

Existing growth research provides little explanation for the very large differences in long-run growth performance across OECD countries. We show that cognitive skills can account for growth differences within the OECD, whereas a range of economic institutions and quantitative measures of...

An individual's human capital has a strong influence on earnings. Yet individual, worker-level estimations of earnings rarely include the characteristics of co-workers or detailed firm-level controls. In this paper, we use a unique matched worker-workplace dataset to estimate the effect on own...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

We investigate whether the costs of job displacement differ between blue collar and white collar workers. In the short run earnings and employment losses are substantial for both groups but stronger for white collar workers. In the long run, there are only weak effects for blue collar workers...

In this paper we investigate how fertility decisions respond to unexpected career interruptions which occur as a consequence of job displacement. Using an event study approach we compare the birth rates of displaced women with those of women unaffected by job loss after establishing the...