The paper studies the relationship between teenagers' first labor market experience and subsequent labor market performance using data on all Swedish youths graduating from vocational high schools in the recession years of 1991-94. Sibling fixed-effects combined with detailed data on high school...

Many countries use centralized exit exams as a governance devise of the school system. While abundant evidence suggests positive effects of central exams on achievement tests, previous research on university-bound students shows no effects on subsequent earnings. We suggest that labor-market...

Using microdata on the 1995 cohort of Italian high school graduates, this paper studies the relationship between the type of high school attended (general versus technical; private versus public) and indicators of subsequent performance. Simultaneity issues that potentially bias this type of...

In this paper we develop a structural model for job search behavior of students entering the labor market. The model includes endogenous search effort and on-the-job search. Since students usually do not start a regular job before graduation but start job search earlier, our model is non...

Does the educational track (technical or professional, as opposed to general) provide individuals with networks that are useful in the labor market? And how do these networks help? In this paper, we consider the effect of the educational track on the means by which individuals find employment,...

In this paper we investigate the evolution of the gender wage gap over early careers of skilled workers in Germany using administrative longitudinal data. Advantages of the data for this type of analysis are that we observe complete work and skill accumulation histories from the beginning for up...

We estimate a structural dynamic programming model of schooling decisions and obtain individual specific estimates of the local (and average) returns to schooling as well as the returns to experience. Homogeneity of the returns to human capital is strongly rejected in favor of a discrete...

We analyse the extent of intergenerational transmission through parental capital, ethnic capital and neighbourhood effects on several aspects of the school-to-work transition of 2 nd generation immigrants and young ethnic Danes. The main findings are that parental capital has strong positive...

In this paper we investigate when the male-female wage differential arises: Does it evolve over the early career or does it exist right from entry into first employment onwards? For the analysis we use new administrative longitudinal data and focus on the early careers of skilled workers in...

The quality of labor-market entry achieved by newly qualified apprentices in West Germany is analyzed from 1948 to 1992. A bivariate probit model, using data from the BIBB/IAB employment survey, is applied to estimate simultaneously the quality of the school-toapprenticeship transition and that...