We bring together the strands of literature on the returns to education, its spillovers, and the role of the employer shaping the wage distribution. The aim is to analyze the labor market returns to education taking into account who the worker is (worker unobserved ability), what he does (the...

We provide first evidence regarding the direct impact of educational mismatch on firm productivity. To do so, we rely on representative linked employer-employee panel data for Belgium covering the period 1999-2006. Controlling for simultaneity issues, time-invariant unobserved workplace...

This paper examines the relationship between immigration and over-education, taking advantage of access to rich matched employer-employee data for the Belgian private sector for the period 1999-2010. Covering more than 1.2 million workers, the data enable the authors to: i) measure...

This paper is one of the first to estimate how the region in which an establishment is located affects its productivity, wage cost and cost competitiveness (i.e. its productivity-wage gap). To do so, we use detailed linked employer-employee panel data for Belgium and rely on methodological...

This study addresses the question: Are workers who hold a university degree increasingly filling job openings meant for people with lower levels of schooling? It focuses on Portugal, where the higher education system has been expanding at a fast pace and the share of university graduates in...

This paper quantifies the long-run impact of exposure to youth minimum wages and sheds light on its mechanisms. It uses remarkable longitudinal data spanning for twenty years and explores legislative changes that define groups of teenagers exposed for different durations. After controlling for...

This paper investigates the impact of wage dispersion on firm productivity in different working environments. More precisely, it examines the interaction with: i) the skills of the workforce, using a more appropriate indicator than the standard distinction between white- and blue collar workers,...

Using longitudinal employer-employee data spanning over a 22-year period, we compare age-wage and age-productivity profiles and find that productivity increases until the age range of 50-54, whereas wages peak around the age 40-44. At younger ages, wages increase in line with productivity gains...

Different empirical studies suggest that the structure of employment in the U.S. and Great Britain tends to polarise into good and bad jobs. We provide updated evidence that polarisation also occurred in Germany since the mid-1980s until 2008. Using representative panel data, we show that this...

Although the practice of military conscription was widespread during most of the past century, credible evidence on the effects of mandatory service is limited. Angrist (1990) showed that the Vietnam-era draft in the U.S. lowered the early-career wages of conscripts, a finding he attributed to...