This paper studies the effects of a voluntary skill certification scheme in an online freelancing labour market. The paper show that obtaining skill certificates increases a worker’s earnings. This effect is not driven by increased worker productivity but by decreased employer uncertainty. The...

Income and earning inequality has been on the rise in most of the OECD and in many emerging economies since the 1980s. This paper estimates a model of earnings inequality across OECD countries that incorporates determinants of relative demand and supply of more and less-skilled labour. Drawing...

The Czech labour market has undergone significant changes as a consequence of economic restructuring. This paper analyses these changes, highlighting both the impact of the recent economic crisis and some of the longer-run determinants of the Czech labour market. The higher share of tertiary...

Human capital is key for economic growth. Not only is it linked to aggregate economic performance but also to each individual’s labour market outcomes. However, a skilled population is not enough to achieve high and inclusive growth, as skills need to be put into productive use at work. Thanks...

This paper examines job polarization at the level of local labor markets in Germany over a 30-year period. The major explanation of job polarization is skill biased technological change (SBTC): new technologies are complementary to high paying jobs but substitute workers in routine manual jobs...

Poor labour-market outcomes remain one of Poland’s major structural weaknesses, impeding firms’ competitiveness and the nation’s potential output. Boosting employment prospects is also critical, as the country will soon be ageing at a fast pace. Despite long working hours, labour...

Greece’s labour market entered the COVID-19 shock following several years of sustained employment growth and with wages picking up. Unemployment remained high and employment rates were low, especially among women, the young and older workers. The shock led to a sharp fall in labour force...

Occupational licensing and non-competition agreements are two important types of labour market regulation in the United States, both covering around one fifth of all workers. While some regulation is needed to protect safety and ensure quality of services, it also creates entry barriers and...

In light of the remarkable number of young people who pass through a period of temp work at the beginning of their career the question arises whether labor market entry via temporary work agency (TWA) employment has any (persistent) effects on labor market outcomes. We investigate this issue...

This paper analyses the causal effects of educational mismatch on wages, individual health and job satisfaction. As educational mismatch is subject to unobserved heterogeneity in all of these fields, different identification strategies are applied to derive causal effects. In the wage...