This paper examines how employee earnings at small firms respond to a cash flow shock in the form of a government R&D grant. We use ranking data on applicant firms, which we link to IRS W2 earnings and other U.S. Census Bureau datasets. In a regression discontinuity design, we find that the...

Till the early-1990s the collectively-bargained labor contract (between the trade-union that presented the employees, and the employer or the employers'-association) was the norm, granting salaried workers a stable and protected labor contract. Thereafter, and more significantly after 1995, the...

We investigate the effects of two reforms of temporary employment using panel data on Italian firms. We exploit variation in their implementation across regions and sectors for identification. Our results show that the reform of apprenticeship contracts increased job turnover and induced the...

Firms may be reluctant to provide general training if workers can quit and use their gained skills elsewhere. "Training contracts" that impose a penalty for premature quitting can help alleviate this inefficiency. Using plausibly exogenous contractual variation from a leading trucking firm, we...

Econometric evaluations of public-sponsored training programmes generally find little evidence of an impact of such policies on transition rates out of unemployment. We perform the first evaluation of training effects for the unemployed adults in France, exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset...

Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test...

As an alternative to traditional academic schooling, vocational schooling in South Africa may serve as a safety valve for students encountering difficulty in the transition from school to work. Yet if ineffective, vocational schooling could also be a sinkhole, offering little chance for success...

In this paper, human capital investments are evaluated by assuming heterogeneous returns to schooling. We use the potential outcome approach to measure the causal effect of human capital investments on earnings as a continuous treatment effect. Empirical evidence is based on a sample of West...

We propose an original model of human capital investments after leaving school in which individuals differ in their initial human capital obtained at school, their rate of return, their costs of human capital investments and their terminal values of human capital at a fixed date in the future....

We derive a tractable nonlinear earnings function which we estimate separately for each individual in the NLSY79 data. These estimates yield five important parameters for each individual: three ability measures (two representing the ability to learn and one the ability to earn), a rate of skill...