Relying on a unique integrated database, this work explores the relationship between labour productivity, on one side; intensity and characteristics of companies’ skills need and degree of skill mismatch, on the other. The analysis focuses on a representative sample of Italian limited liability...

This paper surveys the emerging economics literature on the relationship between employee training and firm performance. Most studies find very high returns to training, at least from the perspective of firms, indicating that the costs of training can be recouped in short periods of time. These...

Overeducated workers are more productive and have higher wages in comparison to their adequately educated coworkers in the same jobs. However, they face a series of challenges in the labor market, including lower wages in comparison to their similarly educated peers who are in correctly matched...

This study quantitatively assesses two alternative explanations for inter-industry wage differentials: worker heterogeneity in the formof unobserved quality and firmheterogeneity in the form of a firm's willingness to pay (WTP) for workers' productive attributes. We develop an empirical hedonic...

This paper studies the occupational selection among generations of immigrants in the United States and links their choices to the occupational wage distribution in their country of origin. The empirical results suggest that individuals are more likely to take up an occupation in the US that was...

We examine the ability of immigrants to transfer the occupational human capital they acquired prior to immigration. We first augment a model of occupational choice to study the implications of language proficiency on the cross-border transferability of occupational human capital. We then explore...

In this paper we study whether the presence of binding liquidity constraints and the existence of fixed costs can explain the underinvestment of parents in their children's human capital. We first incorporate these two potential mechanisms into the theoretical model of Raut & Tran (2005) and...

We test for the signalling hypothesis versus human capital theory using the Wiles test (1974) in a country which has experienced a dramatic increase in the supply of skills. For this purpose, we construct a job match index based on the usefulness of the school-provided skills and the relevance...

As China's firms upgrade their position in the quality ladder, vocational education may become more important. In this paper, we study returns to secondary vocational education in China paying attention to individual heterogeneity. We use instrumental variables based on geographical and...