This study analyses the effect of public sector sponsored continuous vocational training and retraining in East Germany after unification with West Germany in 1990.

In the simple framework of a static model for equilibrium wages and labour supplies, we show that the incidence of income tax on equilibrium wages can be measured independently from the individual labour supply elasticity. This extends recent work by Blundell, Duncan and Meghir (1998) and Eissa...

How does the persistence of earnings change over the life cycle? Do workers at different ages face the same variance of idiosyncratic earnings shocks? This paper proposes a novel specification for residual earnings that allows for an age profile in the persistence and variance of labor income...

This paper aims at evaluating and comparing across European countries the influence of early-life circumstances, like childhood disparities and educational attainments, on incomes in later life. Using life-history data from SHARELIFE, country-specific structural relationships among childhood...

This paper examines the selection biases in the cyclical behaviour of real wages using the German Socio-Economic Panel Data (GSOEP) for the 1984-2009 period. We find rigid wages of job stayers in Germany.

This paper analyses wage flexibility in Chinese labor market using the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) for the period 1989-2009. China has highly coordinated wage-setting institutions which might contribute to higher wage sensitivity of the coordinated workers, but lower sensitivity in...

In this simulation study, I compare the efficiency and finite sample bias of parameter estimators for popular income dynamic models using various forms of autocovariances. The dynamic models have a random walk or a heterogeneous growth permanent component, a persistent autoregressive component...

Using data from social security records on Spanish males, we investigate the wage effects of working under a fixed-term contract. In a first step, we provide fixed-effects estimates of the wage effect of working under a fixed-term contract for low-skilled, medium-skilled, and high-skilled men...

We apply a recently proposed method to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from risk in returns to education. We replicate the original study on US men and extend to US women, UK men and German men. Most original results are not robust. A college education cannot universally be considered an...

This paper challenges the economic constraints associated with the so-called post-industrial trilemma. Following Iversen’s and Wren’s seminal 1998 paper, it has been widely accepted that differential industry-level productivity increases rule out a solidaristic structure of wages, due to the...