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...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

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...

To explore whether changes in the selection into full-time work among German men were a driver in the rise in wage inequality since the mid-1990s, we propose a modification of selection-corrected quantile regressions. Addressing Huber and Melly’s (J Appl Econom 30(7):1144–1168, 2015)...

In many European countries, the majority of workers have their wages directly defined byindustry-level agreements. In addition, for some workers, industry agreements arecomplemented by firm-specific agreements. Yet, the relative importance of firm and industryagreements (in other words, the...

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily covered. This institutional setup suggests to explicitly distinguish union...

The rise of unemployment in West Germany is often attributed to an inflexibility of the wage structure in the face of a skill bias in labor demand trends. In addition, there is concern in Germany that during the 70s and 80s unions were pursuing a too egalitarian wage policy. In a cohort...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the structure of earnings in West Germany across skill groups and industries. Our analysis is based on data from the German Socioeconomic Panel for the period 1984 to 1994. We estimate quantile regressions, both for the entire sample period and for...