This paper provides an introduction and overview of my research on the Economics of Language. The approach is that language skills among immigrants and native-born linguistic minorities are a form of human capital. There are costs and benefits associated with this characteristic embodied in the...

We use a large linked employer-employee data set to analyze the importance of relativewage positions in the context of individual quit decisions as an inverse measure of jobsatisfaction. Our main findings are: (1) Workers with higher relative wage positionswithin their firms are on average more...

This paper analyzes the response of earnings to payroll tax rates using a cohort-basedreform in Greece. All individuals who started working on or after 1993 face permanently amuch higher earnings cap for payroll taxes, creating a large and permanent discontinuity inmarginal payroll tax rates by...

This paper examines the roles of specialized versus general skills in explaining variation in thereturns to an agriculture degree across majors inside and outside the agricultural industry. Thefocus on returns by sector of employment is motivated by the finding that most agriculturalmajors are...

Across nine transition economies, it is the young, educated, English-speaking workers with thebest access to local telecommunications infrastructures that work with computers. Theseworkers earn about 25% more than do workers of comparable observable skills who do not usecomputers. Controlling...

This paper provides a longitudinal perspective on changes in Spanish male earnings inequality for the period 1993-2000, by decomposing the earnings covariance structure into its permanent and transitory parts. According to the Spanish sample of the European Community Household Panel,...

Few researchers have examined the nature and determinants of earnings differentials amongreligious groups, and none has been undertaken in the context of conflict-prone multireligioussocieties like the one in India. We address this lacuna in the literature by examiningthe differences in the...