Persistent productivity gains to rural-urban migrants have been documented by a number ofresearchers. One interpretation of this result is that individuals learn higher value skills incities than they would have learned in less dense areas. Another explanation for this result,however, is that...

This paper assesses labor market segmentation across formal and informal salaried jobs andself-employment in three Latin American and three transition countries. It looks separately atthe markets for skilled and unskilled labor, inquiring if segmentation is an exclusive feature ofthe latter....

In Romania, the communist regime promoted an official policy of gender equality for morethan 40 years, providing equal access to education and employment, and restricting paydifferentiation based on gender. After its fall in December 1989, the promotion of equalopportunities and treatment for...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countriesfor the participants. There is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered,and there might be an important element of selection in who obtains an apprenticeship, andwhat type. To...

This paper studies how portable skill accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data ontasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task-specific human capital tomeasure the transferability of skills empirically. Our results on occupational mobility andwages show that labor...

We compare the returns to education (RTE) for entrepreneurs and employees, based on 19waves of the NLSY database. By using instrumental variable techniques (IV) and takingaccount of selectivity, we find that the RTE are significantly higher for entrepreneurs than foremployees (18.3 percent and...

This paper examines the incidence and wage effects of over-skilling within the Australianlabour market. It finds that approximately 30 percent of employees believed themselves to bemoderately over-skilled and 11 percent believed themselves to be severely over-skilled. Theincidence of skills...

Although empirical evidence available suggests that information and communication technologies (ICT) have positively contributed to important sectors of the Mexican economy, it is still unknown to which extent ICT have truly contributed to productivity among these sectors. The increasing...

Skill-biased technical change has occupied empirical economists for much of the 90s. However, the empirical literature has not progressed much beyond observing a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. Two hypotheses on the root causes of skill biases in technical...

Human capital and deferred compensation might explain why firms employ but do nothire older workers. Adjustments of wage-tenure profiles for older new entrants areexplored in the context of deferred compensation. From an equity theory perspective,such adjustments might lead to adverse incentive...