We use data on international chess tournaments to study the relationship between age and mental productivity in a brain-intensive profession. We show that less talented players tend to leave the game in the earliest phases of their career. When the effects of age on productivity vary with...

We investigate the expected college completion time of European college students by using data from a survey of more than 3000 students in 10 countries. We explain observed excess time to graduation by paying special attention to labor market variables, such as unemployment, wage differentials...

Expected earnings and expected returns to education are seen by labor economists as a major determinant of educational attainment. In spite of this, the empirical knowledge about expectations and their formation is scarce. In this paper we report the results of the first systematic study of the...

We study the contribution of health-related behaviors to the health-education gradient by distinguishing between short-run and long-run mediating effects: while in the former only current or lagged behaviors are taken into account, in the latter we consider the entire history of behaviors. We...

We exploit the cross?country and time variation in the demographics and education structure of 11 European countries to study how cohort size has affected real earnings in Europe. When we pool the data of all countries, we find that cohort size has a negative and statistically significant effect...

Several commentators have argued that vocational education provides a smoother school to work transition than academic education. In the long - run, however, the skills it provides depreciate faster and individuals with this type of education are less capable of adapting to technical change....

We study the contribution of health-related behaviors to the health-education gradient by distinguishing between short-run and long-run mediating effects: while in the former only current or lagged behaviors are taken into account, in the latter we consider the entire history of behaviors. We...

We study if the combined significant reduction in the pupil-teacher ratio and increase in parental education observed in Italy between the end of IIWW and the end of 1980s had a significant impact on the educational attainment and labor market returns of a representative sample of Italians born...

In this empirical paper, I use the 1996 wave of the ECHP dataset to investigate the relationship between measures of wage compression and training incidence in 11 European countries. I find that, after controlling for individual factors and country specific institutional differences, there is...

Public finance solutions to high unemployment in Europe have often been advocated during the past years. With unemployment concentrated among the young and unskilled, it has been suggested that the reduction of social security contributions for low wage earnings, financed by a carbon tax, could...