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 an exploratory analysis on the relationship between educational qualification and work status in Italy, with a particular focus on entrepreneurs and self-employed workers. Rough data are drawn from four waves (1995, 1998, 2002, and 2004) of the Survey of Household Income and...

The paper concentrates on the question whether the low level of productivity in East Germany can be explained by deficits in the stock of human capital. It is shown that figures on ?formal? qualifications yield a too optimistic view on human capital endowments; in fact, the effective stock on...

One problem with the theory of firm-specific human capital is that it is difficult to generate convincing examples of investment that could generate the sometimes observed large and continuing effects on earnings. Another approach, called the ?skill-weights? view, allows all skills to be general...

Thurow?s job-competition model implies that overeducation is contingent upon the differing skill endowments of employees. As yet, only rudimentary evidence has been furnished to confirm this relationship. In the present paper, we test the theory in a more sophisticated manner, by means of a more...

Census data for 1990/91 indicate that Australian and Canadian female immigrants have higher levels of English fluency, education (relative to native-born women), and income (relative to native-born women) than do U.S. female immigrants. A prominent explanation for this skill deficit of U.S....

Mobility of workers involves flows of labour, human capital and other production factors and thus contributes to a more efficient allocation of resources. Besides these effects on allocative efficiency, migrant flows affect relative wages and also change the international and national...

The paper investigates the relationship between human capital diversity measured in terms of occupational diversity and a firm's likelihood to innovate. The empirical analysis is based on a linked employer-employee panel dataset of German firms over the period 1998 to 2007. Despite notable...

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...

Mobility of workers involves flows of labour, human capital and other production factors and thus contributes to a more efficient allocation of resources. Besides these effects on allocative efficiency, migrant flows affect relative wages and also change the international and national...