We apply a recently proposed method to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from risk in returns to education. We replicate the original study on US men and extend to US women, UK men and German men. Most original results are not robust. A college education cannot universally be considered an...

Our findings suggest the existence of a gender reservation wage gap. The presence of children, particularly pre-school age children, plays an important role in determining the proportion of this gap that can be explained by individual characteristics. For individuals without children, the...

In this paper we use a relatively new panel data quantile regression technique to examine native-immigrant earnings differentials 1) throughout the conditional wage distribution, and 2) controlling for individual heterogeneity. No previous papers have simultaneously considered these factors. We...

This paper examines ethnic wage differentials for the entire population of students enrolled in 1996 using unique administrative panel data for the period 1996 to 2005 from the Dutch tertiary education system. The study decomposes wage differentials into two components: a component which can be...

We first confirm previous results with the German Socio-Economic Panel by Layard, et al. (2010), and obtain strong negative effects of comparison income. However, when we split the sample by age, we find quite different results for reference income. The effects on life-satisfaction are positive...

We show that in the US, the UK, Italy and Sweden women whose first child is a boy are less likely to work in a typical week and work fewer hours than women with first-born girls. The puzzle is why women in these countries react in this way to the sex of their first child, which is chosen...

We review research on the impact of immigration on income distribution. We discuss routes through which immigration can affect income distribution in the host and source countries, including compositional effects and effects on native incomes. Immigration may affect the composition of skills...

Using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, we investigate the role of maternal gender role attitudes in explaining the differential educational expectations mothers have for their daughters and sons, and consequently their children's later educational outcomes and labour supply. We find that...

In this paper I develop a consistent estimator of the population average treatment effect (PATE) which is based on a nonstandard version of the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition. As a result, I extend the recent literature which has utilized the treatment effects framework to reinterpret this...

We examine the effect of single-sex classes on the pass rates, grades, and course choices of students in a coeducational university. We randomly assign students to all-female, all-male, and coed classes and, therefore, get around the selection issues present in other studies on single-sex...