Human capital is transferable across occupations, but only to a limited extent because of differences in occupational skill-profiles. Higher skill overlap between occupations renders less of individuals' human capital useless in occupational switches. Current occupational distance measures...

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

High-tenure workers who lose their jobs experience a large and prolonged fall in wages and earnings. The aim of this paper is to understand and quantify the forces behind this empirical regularity. We propose a structural model of the labor market with heterogeneous firms, on-the-job search and...

This paper provides a novel microeconomic foundation for pecuniary human capital externalities in a labor market model of monopsonistic competition. Multiple equilibria arise because of a strategic complementarity in investment decisions.

Up to now, there has been little research on the impact of e-recruitment on the recruitment process as a whole. The present study fills part of this gap by investigating the effect of e-recruitment on the design of the recruitment process. Three explorative case studies were carried out in three...

This paper investigates earnings differentials between immigrants and natives. We focus on returns and on the (imperfect) international transferability of human capital. Data are drawn from the 2009 Italian Labour Force Survey (LFS). We show that returns to human capital are considerably lower...