Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...

Scores in standardized international student achievement tests and some recent adult literacy studies provide interesting data on the quality of educational outputs and on the skill level of the population that can be a useful complement to the data on the quantity of schooling which have been...

This paper studies the impact of U.S. immigration barriers on global knowledge production. We present four key findings. First, among Nobel Prize winners and Fields Medalists, migrants to the U.S. play a central role in the global knowledge network- representing 20-33% of the frontier knowledge...

This paper estimates the effects of equipment investment on relative wages and employment of skilled labor and explores their dynamics. The basic hypothesis is that they are positive, due to either equipment-skill complementarity or to skill advantage in technology adoption. Using a panel data...

We present evidence about the role of rent sharing in fostering the interdependence of labour markets around the world. Our results draw on a firm-level panel of more than 2,000 multinationals and more than 5,000 of their affiliates, covering 47 home and host countries. We find considerable...

Economists have concerns about the firing cost implications of mandated severance plans. Analysis reveals that predicted severance plan consequences depend critically on the precise structure of the plan. Whether governments mandate (i) severance insurance plans or (ii) severance savings plans...

The process leading to the setting of the minimum wage so far has been fairly overlooked by economists. This paper suggests that this is a serious limitation as the setting regime contributes to explain cross-country variation in the fine-tuning of the minimum wage, hence in the way in which the...