We address the impact of education upon wage inequality by drawing on evidence from fifteen European countries, during a period ranging between 1980 and 1995. We focus on within-educational-levels wage inequality by estimating quantile regressions of Mincer equations and analysing the...

This paper utilizes the self-employed to analyze the observed increase in the educational earnings premium in the 1980?s. The paper compares the predictions of the signaling and human capital models in response to an exogenous demand shock such as a skill-biased technological change. Since the...

Despite the lower quality of education provided Africans compared with whites in South Africa, the percentage wage gains associated with additional years of primary, secondary, and higher education are substantially larger for Africans than for whites in 1993, and they increase for both race...

This paper looks at the economic returns to different fields of study in Ireland in 2004 and also the value placed on various job-related competencies, accumulated on completion of higher education, in the Irish labour market. In examining these issues the paper seeks to control for potential...

This paper proposes an empirical approach to decompose the distributional effects of minimum wages into effects for workers moving out of employment, workers moving into employment, and workers continuing in employment. We estimate the effects of the minimum wage on the hazard rate for wages,...

Despite changing attitudes around disability over time, people with disabilities still face large barriers to labour market participation. We apply a sociological framework that considers both supply- and demand-side explanations for labour market inequality to help understand the continuing...

The labor market "quality" of immigrants is a subject of debate among immigration researchers, and a major public policy concern. However, traditional methods of measuring human capital are particularly difficult to apply to recently arrived immigrants. Many factors that have a negative effect...

This paper quantifies the long-run impact of exposure to youth minimum wages and sheds light on its mechanisms. It uses remarkable longitudinal data spanning for twenty years and explores legislative changes that define groups of teenagers exposed for different durations. After controlling for...

In this paper we analyze investments in human capital assets in a way which is standard for financial assets, but not (yet) for human capital assets. We study mean-variance plots of human capital assets. We compare the properties of human capital returns using a performance measure and by using...