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...

Using the underexplored, sizeable and long Lifetime Labour Market Database (LLMDB) we estimated the immigrant-native earnings gap across the entire earnings distribution, across continents of nationality and across cohorts of arrival in the UK between 1978 and 2006. We exploited the longitudinal...

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...

This paper considers what has hitherto been a relatively neglected subject in the wage inequality literature, albeit one that has been becoming more important over time, namely the role played by increases in postgraduate education. We document increases in the number of workers with a...

Using a survey of a cohort of UK graduates, linked to administrative data on higher education participation, this paper investigates the labour market attainment of recent graduates by subject of study. We document a large heterogeneity in the mean wages of graduates from different subjects and...

We focus on the effect of English deficiency on the native-immigrant wage gap for male employees in the UK using the first wave of the UK Household Longitudinal Survey. We show that the wage gap is robust to controls for age, region of residence, educational attainment and ethnicity. However,...

The objective of this paper is to construct and quantitatively assess an equilibrium search model with on-the-job search and general human capital accumulation. In the model workers enter the labour market with different abilities and firms differ in their productivities. Wages are dispersed...