Greece experienced a devastating civil war in 1946-1949. This led to many deaths, economic losses, and severe reductions in schooling expenditures and attendance. Using an instrumental variables approach, we estimate the 1977 returns to schooling, showing that for those affected by the civil...

Using a Mincer-type wage function, we estimate cohort effects in the returns to education for West German workers born between 1925 and 1974. The main problem to be tackled in the specification is to separately identify cohort, experience, and possibly also age effects in the returns. For women,...

We document and analyse the wage gap between vocational and general secondary education in Portugal between 1994 and 2013. As Portuguese workers have been educated in different school systems, we have to distinguish birth cohorts. Analysing the wage gaps within cohorts, we find no support for...

Education can generate important externalities that contribute towards economic growth and convergence. In this paper, we study the drivers of such externalities by conducting the first meta- analysis of the social returns to education literature. We analyse over 1,000 estimates from 31 articles...

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...

Register data are known for their large sample size and good data quality. The measurement accuracy of variables highly depends on their high importance for administrative processes. The education variable in the IAB employment sub-sample is an example for information that is gathered without a...

This paper establishes that individuals with an internal locus of control, i.e., who believe that reinforcement in life comes from their own actions instead of being determined by luck or destiny, earn higher wages. However, this positive effect only translates into labor income via the channel...

Due to their origin from universities, academic spin‐offs operate at the forefront of the technological development. Therefore, spin‐offs exhibit a skill‐biased labour demand, i.e. spin‐offs have a high demand for employees with cutting edge knowledge and technical skills. In order to...

Discontinuities in the employment profile are supposed to cause wage cuts since they imply an interruption in the accumulation of human capital as well as a depreciation of the human capital stock built up in the past. In this paper, we estimate the return to effective experience, taking into...

Decisions taken at the start of one’s career have long-term consequences and one important decision graduates have to make is whether to be regionally mobile when looking for the first job. We investigate whether being regionally mobile for the first job following graduation rather than to...