Given asymmetric information, this paper explores the need for non-tenure-track jobs in academia alongside the usual tenure-track positions. It also explains the coexistence of these two types of jobs in research universities as an equilibrium phenomenon. The increased effort needed to produce...

We study compensation packages in family and non-family firms. Using matched employer-employee data for a representative sample of French establishments, we first show that family firms pay on average lower wages to their workers. We find that part of this wage gap is due to differences in...

Recent controversy has surrounded the relative value of public and private sector remuneration. We define a comprehensive measure of Total Reward (TR) which includes not just pay, but pensions and other 'benefits in kind', evaluate it as the present value of the sum of all these payments over...

We estimate the monetary return to attending a highly selective college using the College and Beyond (C&B) Survey linked to Detailed Earnings Records from the Social Security Administration (SSA). This paper extends earlier work by Dale and Krueger (2002) that examined the relationship between...

This paper explores students' expectations about the returns to completing higher education and provides first evidence on perceived signaling and human capital effects. We elicit counterfactual labor market expectations for the hypothetical scenarios of leaving university with or without a...

As Switzerland experiences a severe shortage of nurses, this paper investigates the impact of students' ex ante wage expectations on their choice to pursue a nursing college education. This analysis contributes to a small yet rapidly developing body of literature that uses subjective expectation...

In this paper we use a newly constructed dataset following 30,000 Italian individuals from high school to labor market and we analyze whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major, their academic performance and their labor market income. We...

We consider the effects of student ability, college quality, and the interaction between the two on academic outcomes and future earnings. Both ability and college quality strongly improve outcomes and earnings. We find little evidence to support the "mismatch" hypothesis that college quality...

We explore whether the choice of broad versus specialized university curricula affects subsequent labor market outcomes, as measured by earnings, full-time permanent employment, and unemployment six months after university graduation. We exploit a unique episode in the history of the National...

I take advantage of a sharp discontinuity in the probability of admission to an elite university at the admission score threshold, to estimate causal returns to college education quality. I use a newly constructed dataset, which combines individual administrative records about high school,...