This paper investigates the impact of changes in the funding of higher education in England on students' choices and outcomes. Over the last two decades – through three major reforms in 1998, 2006 and 2012 – undergraduate university education in public universities moved from being free to...

Skills shortages and skill mismatch are a pressing concern for policymakers in several developing countries, and in East Asia specifically. Providing on-the-job training can be an effective policy tool to shape the skills of the existent workforce to the specific needs of the firms. This paper...

This paper analyses the determinants and consequences of horizontal job-education mismatches, an increasingly relevant topic in debates about education and labour markets. This issue reflects the articulation of educational fields and occupations in the labour market. We evaluate the...

Finding an instrument that is orthogonal to the disturbance term in the wage equation has been a topic of great deal of debate. Recently, Chesson et al. (2006) proposed that higher discount rates are significantly associated with a range of sexual behaviours, including having sex before age of...

This paper estimates the return to education using two alternative instrumental variable estimators: one exploits variation in schooling associated with early smoking behaviour, the other uses the raising of the minimum school leaving age. Each instrument estimates a 'local average treatment...

Using nationally representative data in China, we find substantial positive partial correlations of both parents' education with one's wage. In addition, returns to father's education are higher in more monopsonistic and less meritocratic labor markets, including non-coastal regions, the...

In 1994, Blanchflower and Oswald reported that they have found an "empirical law of economics" - the Wage Curve. According to their empirical results, the elasticity of wages with respect to regional unemployment is -0.1. This holds especially for the Anglo-Saxon countries. Our paper reconsiders...

Most economists maintain that the labor market in the United States (and elsewhere) is tight because unemployment rates are low and the Beveridge Curve (the vacancies-to-unemployment ratio) is high. They infer from this that there is potential for wage-push inflation. However, real wages are...

Positive assortative matching implies that high productivity workers and firms match together. However, there is almost no evidence of a positive correlation between the worker and firm contributions in two-way fixed-effects wage equations. This could be the result of a bias caused by standard...

Through panel estimates using OECD country-industry statistics, this paper aims to clarify the determinants of rent creation and the mechanisms of rent sharing, and the role of market regulations in these processes. The empirical analysis is carried out in two steps. The first explains the rent...