This paper develops a novel and tractable empirical approach to estimate the cycle in schooling participation decisions, which we denominate the schooling cycle. The estimation procedure is based on unobserved components time series models that decompose higher education enrollment rates into a...

The purpose of this paper is to study the immigrant performance in France and the impacts on the natives by drawing on research findings from the existing academic literature on the economics of French migration. The research questions are: how do immigrants fare with respect to wages,...

Over the past two decades, technological progress has been biased towards making skilled labor more productive. What does skill-biased technological change imply for business cycles? To answer this question, we construct a quarterly series for the skill premium from the CPS and use it to...

Cognitive functioning of elderly individuals may be affected by events such as the loss of a (grand)child or partner or the onset of a serious chronic condition, and by negative economic shocks such as job loss or the reduction of pension benefits. It is conceivable that the impact of such...

The last decades have shown that the traditional steady job with a permanent contract is on the decline. While permanent contracts and the insider position that they bring are highly valued by workers, research on the returns to human capital have predominantly focused on wages as subject of...

The global financial crisis deeply impacted the South African labour market resulting in the shedding of almost 1 million jobs over 2009 and 2010. Reflecting longer term structural problems, this employment loss translated into a much larger rise in the number of discouraged individuals rather...

In this paper, we investigate the consequences of the rise in educational attainment on the US generational accounts. We build on the 1995 accounts of Gokhale et al. (1999) and disaggregate them per schooling level. We show that low skill newborns are characterized by a negative generational...

In this study we argue that wage inequality and occupational mobility are intimately related. We are motivated by our empirical findings that human capital is occupation-specific and that the fraction of workers switching occupations in the United States was as high as 16% a year in the early...