Comparing cohorts born between 1951 and 1994, we document and interpret changes in the wage differential among graduates from secondary education with a vocational and a general curriculum. The wage gap initially increased and then decreased. We find that these changes cannot be attributed to...

In Australia, the so-called Group of Eight (Go8) universities have lower student-to-staff ratios, better qualified staff, superior research outcomes, and generally better placement in university rankings compared to non-Go8 universities. They are also typically the most competitive universities...

Though extensive research has described the prevalence of educational assortative mating, the causes of its variation across countries and over time is not well understood. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database, I investigate the impact on marital sorting of both inequality...

The main goal of this paper is to document and analyze the long-term evolution of inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the four largest European economies (France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy). Relative IOp represents an important portion of total income inequality, with values ranging from...

Indicators for quality of schooling are not only relatively new in the world but also unavailable for a sizable share of the world's population. In their absence, some proxy measures have been devised. One simple but powerful idea has been to use the schooling premium for migrant workers in the...

This paper re-examines the wage returns to the 1972 Raising of the School Leaving Age (RoSLA) in England and Wales using a high-quality administrative panel dataset covering the relevant cohorts for almost 40 years of their labour market careers. With best practice regression discontinuity...

The returns to schooling are estimated for 28 European and Central Asian countries using the Mincerian function. Our results show that while the public sector pays on average more than the private sector, the effect of education on earnings is stronger in the private sector. However, the returns...

Using new and harmonized worker-level survey data on tasks at work in the developing world, this paper constructs, for the first time, a measure of the skill content of occupations for 10 low and middle-income countries. Following Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003), Acemoglu and Autor (2011), and...

We study how the skill distribution for the whole economy responds to changes in the skill premium which are induced by trade integration. Using administrative data for both Denmark (1993-2012) and Portugal (1993-2011), we perform a two-step empirical analysis. In the first stage we predict the...

Data from the Youth in Transition Survey reveal that almost 40% of Canadian youth who left post-secondary education in 1999 had returned two years later. This paper investigates the extent to which schooling discontinuities affect post-graduation starting real wages and whether the latter are...