Despite a global trend of wage decentralization over the past 30 years, we know very little about the labor market implications of decentralized wage determination. A main reason is the lack of exogenous variation in wage regulation linked to detailed outcome data. Using Swedish registry data...

Wage-differentials by education of men and women are examined from African household surveys to suggest private wage returns to schooling. It is commonly asserted that returns are highest at primary school levels and decrease at secondary and postsecondary levels, whereas private returns in six...

There is hardly any estimate of the returns to schooling in India based on a national level representative data for the recent period. This paper provides estimates of the returns to education in India by gender, age cohort and location (by rural-urban) for the most recent period 1993/4, and...

This paper uses national survey data to estimate up-to-date private rates of return to education in Burkina Faso. Mincer earning regressions are fitted to wage data for women and men, and for public and private sector workers. The main results indicate that rates of return rise by level of...

Despite the lower quality of education provided Africans compared with whites in South Africa, the percentage wage gains associated with additional years of primary, secondary, and higher education are substantially larger for Africans than for whites in 1993, and they increase for both race...

How does the financial aid allocation mechanism affect student behavior? We provide a framework for quantifying the impact of financial aid on student debt, academic capital, and labor market outcomes. We specify and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of simultaneous education, work, and...

We examine the changes in the rewards to cognitive and non-cognitive skill during the time period 1992-2013. Using unique administrative data for Sweden, we document a secular increase in the returns to non-cognitive skill. This increase is particularly pronounced in the private sector, at the...

We analyse full-time monthly wages of employees with parents born in Sweden and of childhood immigrants who arrived before the end of compulsory school-age. We use a detailed disaggregation of background countries, which shows considerable heterogeneity, in overeducation, in returns to education...

This empirical paper analyzes labor market sorting across establishments using Swedish register data on cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. We draw on the theoretical foundations of Chone' and Kramarz (2021), in which workers are endowed with sets of multidimensional skills that need to be...

A pre-condition for employer learning is that signals at labor market entry do not fully reveal graduates' productivity. I model various distinct sources of signal imperfection - such as noise and multi-dimensional types - and characterize their implications for the private return to skill...