Using a dynamic skill accumulation model of schooling and labor supply with learning-by-doing, we decompose early life-cycle wage growth of U.S. white males into four main sources: education, hours worked, cognitive skills (AFQT scores) and unobserved heterogeneity, and evaluate the effect of...

In 1958 Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand how earnings are distributed across the population. In the years since Mincer's seminal work, he as well as his students and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching important conclusions about a whole array...

We construct and estimate by maximum likelihood an equilibrium search model where wages are set by Nash bargaining and idiosyncratic productivity follows a geometric Brownian motion. The proposed framework enables us to endogenize job destruction and to estimate the rate of learning-by-doing....

We make use of longitudinal data for the Russian economy over 1994-2013 to obtain earnings and education information about parents and children. We estimate the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment and earning capacity and find high intergenerational correlation of earnings...

Many studies have found a strong association between economic outcomes of nations and their performance on international cognitive tests. This association is often interpreted as evidence for the importance of cognitive skills for economic growth. However, noncognitive skills, such as motivation...

This paper estimates returns to education using a dynamic model of educational choice that synthesizes approaches in the structural dynamic discrete choice literature with approaches used in the reduced form treatment effect literature. It is an empirically robust middle ground between the two...

This paper investigates the transferability of human capital across countries and the contribution of imperfect human capital portability to the explanation of the immigrant-native wage gap. Using data for West Germany, our results reveal that, overall, education and labor market experience...

This study replicates and challenges the finding of zero wage returns to compulsory schooling in Germany by Pischke and von Wachter (Review of Economics and Statistics, 90(3) 2008, 592-598), which is unusual in the literature yet widely cited and until now uncontradicted. I document that this...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. There is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and there might be an important element of selection in who obtains an apprenticeship, and what type. To...