The labour market situation of low-educated people is particularly critical in most advanced economies, especially among youngsters and women. Policies aiming to increase their employability either try to foster their productivity and/or to decrease their wage cost. Yet, the evidence on the...

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...

While the literature on the incidence and wage effects of over-education is substantial, specific results for doctoral graduates are surprisingly scarce. This article aims to fill this gap, not only by measuring the prevalence of over-educated PhD holders in Europe (i.e. in EU Member States and...

In the last decades, international trade has increased between industrialised countries and between high- and low-wage countries. This important change has raised questions on how international trade affects the labour market. In this spirit, this paper aims to investigate the impact of...

This paper examines the relationship between institutions and the remuneration of different jobs by comparing the German and Belgian labour markets with respect to a typology of institutions (social representations, norms, conventions, legislation, and organisations). The observed institutional...

Labour economists typically assume that pay differences between occupations can be explained with variations in productivity. The empirical evidence on the validity of this assumption is surprisingly thin and subject to various potential biases. The authors use matched employer-employee panel...

We estimate the impact of workforce diversity on productivity, wages and productivity-wage gaps (i.e. profits) using detailed Belgian linked employer-employee panel data. Findings, robust to a large set of covariates, specifications and econometric issues, show that educational (age) diversity...

This paper investigates the increase in wage inequality, the decline in collective bargaining, and the development of the gender wage gap in West Germany between 2001 and 2006. Based on detailed linked employer-employee data, we show that wage inequality is rising strongly ﾖ driven not only by...

This paper studies the relationship between employment and wage structures in West Germany based on the IAB employment subsample 1975-1997. It extends the analytical framework of Card and Lemieux (2001) which simultaneously includes skill and age as important dimensions of heterogeneity. After...

Economic theory advances a number of reasons for the existence of a wage gap between part-time and full-time workers. Empirical work has concentrated on the wage effects of part-time work for women. For men, much less empirical evidence exists, mainly because of lacking data. In this paper, we...