This paper incorporates job search through personal contacts into an equilibrium matching model with a segregated labor market. Firms can post wage offers in the regular job market, alternatively they can save on advertising costs and rely on word-of-mouth communication. Wages are then...

We investigate wage differences between newly hired and incumbent employees in identical functions using detailed personnel data from a large number of banks. We first show in a formal model of job switching that (i) incumbents earn less than new recruits when human capital is mostly general but...

Job protection reduces job turnover by changing firms' hiring and firing decisions. Yet the effect of job protection on workers' quit decisions and post-quit outcomes is still unknown. We present the first evidence using individual panel data from 12 European countries, which differ both in...

There is a growing debate in Europe about whether parental leave should be short or long. The paper evaluates the impact of short parental leave on mothers' employment status and subsequent wages, with a special focus on the part-time parental leave option. It exploits a policy reform that took...

We shed new light on the effects of having children on hourly wages by exploiting access to data on the entire population of employed same-sex twins in Denmark. Our second contribution is the use of administrative data on absenteeism; the amount of hours off due to holidays and sickness. Our...

Using the underexplored, sizeable and long Lifetime Labour Market Database (LLMDB) we estimate the immigrant–native earnings gap at entry and over time for the UK between 1978 and 2006. That is, we attempt to separately estimate cohort and assimilation effects. We also estimate the associated...

The paper provides a theoretical foundation for the empirical regularities observed in estimations of wage consequences of overeducation and undereducation. Workers with more education than required for their jobs are observed to suffer wage penalties relative to workers with the same education...

We provide the first joint evidence on the relationship between individuals' cognitive abilities, their personality and earnings for Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, we employ scores from an ultra-short IQ-test and a set of measures of personality traits, namely...

This chapter discusses the large literature and numerous issues regarding education-related differences in income in the U.S. Early analyses of skill-related differences compared the earnings of workers across occupations. The general consensus of these investigations was that skill premiums...

This chapter analyzes the international evidence on the relationship between educational wage premia and the distribution of personal labor earnings. The aim is to review what is known about the contribution of differences in relative wages across schooling levels to the degree of variability,...