Macroeconomic data are indispensable for modern governance, yet it is often unclear how reliable these data are. The production process of macroeconomic data inside the statistical offices is often not very transparent for the general public. Bystanders usually have no choice but to take for...

Economists generally assume, implicitly, that "the return to schooling" is invariant across local labor markets. We demonstrate that this outcome pertains if and only if preferences are homothetic - a special case that seems unlikely. Our theory predicts that returns to education will instead be...

Does interacting product and labor market regulation alter the impact of immigration on wages of competing native workers? Focusing on the large, sudden and unanticipated wave of migration from East to West Germany after German reunification and allowing for endogenous immigration, we compare...

Demand for tertiary education is ever increasing in developing countries such as Malawi. Current statistics indicate that enrolment in Malawian private local universities has surpassed that in public universities. There is however no empirical evidence on whether the private-owned service...

Lucas (1988) hypothesised that human capital externalities explain persistent productivity growth and become manifest via interactions between workplace colleagues. Consistent with the first part of this hypothesis, Fox and Milbourne (2006) concluded that an increase in the average level of...

Privately observed ability increases output, and reduces effort required to complete tasks, in a model where harder tasks produce more output. The relation between average quality of the workforce and the wage rate is ambiguous. The model also produces a rat-race, in the sense that some...

The concept of a firm's human capital is reconsidered to include both the technical and the social skills of its workforce. Technical skills are defined by the ability to turn inputs into outputs, and measured by the productivity of unit labor effort. Social skills are defined by the propensity...

With this article, the authors are the first to analyze and explain the relationship between part-time employment and firm productivity. Using a unique data set on the Dutch pharmacy sector that includes the working hours of all employees and a "hard" physical measure of firm productivity, the...

This NEUJOBS research report focuses on links between age, productivity and lifelong learning. Various data sources (EU-SILC, LFS, Structure of Earnings Survey, SHARE, ELSA, SHARELIFE) and methodological approaches were used in this report. Our analysis identifies clusters of countries with...