We study how signaling skills that are specific to college majors affect labor market outcomes of college graduates. We rely on census-like data and a regression discontinuity design to study the impacts of a well-known award given to top performers on a mandatory nationwide exam in Colombia....

The apprenticeship system is the most important source of formal post-secondary training in Germany. Using German register data - the IAB Employment Sample - we find that apprentices staying with their training firm after graduation have longer first-job durations but not higher wages than...

We use individual survey data providing detailed information on stress, technology adoption, and work, worker, and employer characteristics, in combination with recent measures of AI and robot exposure, to investigate how new technologies affect worker stress. We find a persistent negative...

This paper documents novel facts on within-occupation task and skill changes over the past two decades in Germany. In a second step, it reveals a distinct relationship between occupational work content and exposure to artificial intelligence (AI) and automation (robots). Workers in occupations...

Labor market institutions shape the return to workers’ skills. They define the incentives of firms and workers to invest in general and specific skills, affecting the returns to experience and tenure. This paper presents an empirical assessment of this hypothesis. We take advantage of rich...

The aim of this paper is to provide firm-level evidence on the short-run link between outsourcing and labor productivity using an original dataset of Italian manufacturing firms, and applying a two-stage probit least squares estimator. We find a positive effect on productivity from outsourcing...

A randomized controlled trial with 945 entrepreneurs in Jamaica shows positive short-term impacts of soft-skills training on business outcomes. The effects are concentrated among men and disappear 12 months after the training. The main channel is increased adoption of recommended business...

Matched employee-employer data from the UK are used to investigate the importance of social skills, in particular team-work and communication with co-workers, as a driver of wage growth for workers with lower formal education. We find that in social skills tasks, workers enjoy greater wage...

We conduct a meta-analysis of 44 studies and 68 different managerial skills training programs, with the aim of identifying program characteristics that can lead to more effective public policies promoting firm growth and entrepreneurship. We synthesize 431 estimates to assess the effects of...