This paper examines a broad set of short- and long-term impacts of Individual Placement and Support (IPS) for disability benefit recipients with severe mental disabilities. IPS is a specific intervention that first aims to place an individual in employment and subsequently trains the worker on...

The size of the public sector in terms of employment and compensation has a strong life-cycle dimension. We establish a quantitative partial-equilibrium life-cycle model with incomplete markets, private and public sectors, and risk-averse workers, and use it to (i) calculate three dimensions of...

Variation in assessor stringency in awarding benefits leaves applicants exposed to uninsured risk that could be systematic if discretion were exercised selectively. We test for this using administrative data on applications to the Dutch disability insurance program. We find that discretion is...

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...

We assess the effectiveness of Job Corps (JC), the largest job training program targeting disadvantaged youth in the United States, by constructing nonparametric bounds for the average and quantile treatment effects of the program on wages. Our preferred estimates point toward convincing...

We investigate minimum wage spillovers by exploiting the first-time introduction of a minimum wage within a quasi-experiment in a context with an extraordinary large bite: the German roofing industry. We find positive wage spillovers for medium-skilled workers with wages just above the minimum...

Using a firm level dataset from four regions of Russia covering 1996/97, an investigation was carried out into how the surplus created within the firm is divided between profits and wages. An efficient bargaining framework based on the work of Svejnar (1986) is employed which takes into account...

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) take-up tends to increase during recessions. We exploit variation across immigrant groups in the non-pecuniary costs of participating in SSDI to examine the role that costs play in applicant decisions across the business cycle. We show that immigrants...

We develop a new quantile-based panel data framework to study the nature of income persistence and the transmission of income shocks to consumption. Log-earnings are the sum of a general Markovian persistent component and a transitory innovation. The persistence of past shocks to earnings is...

Success in life increasingly depends on key skills that allow people to thrive in education, the labor market, and their interactions with others. In this paper, we emphasize creativity as a key skill that is essential to open-ended problem solving and resistant to automation. We use rich...