This paper examines how human capital based approaches explain the distribution of earnings. It assesses traditional, quasi-experimental, and new micro-based structural models, the latter of which gets at population heterogeneity by estimating individual-specific earnings function parameters....

This paper analyses the relationship between education, gender and earnings in France and Germany. The model chosen here enables to estimate the impact of education not only on the expected earnings level but also on their dispersion, taking gender-specific sample selectivity into account. The...

This paper analyses the relationship between education, gender and earnings in France and Germany. The model chosen here enables one to estimate the impact of education not only on the expected earnings level but also on their dispersion, taking gender-specific sample selectivity into account....

Using four decades of variation in the federal and state Earned Income Tax Credit, we estimate the impact of the EITC on education and employment outcomes on children exposed to EITC expansions in childhood. Reduced-form results suggest that an additional $1,000 in EITC exposure when a child is...

What is the impact of the minimum wage on the college wage premium? I show that job-ladder models imply that the effect should be small on impact---raising only the wages of workers bound by the minimum wage---and grow over time as workers slowly move up the job ladder. Guided by my theory, I...

This paper models earnings of male and female Bachelor's graduates in Canada five years after graduation. Using a university fixed-effect approach, the research finds evidence of significant (fixed) variations in earnings among graduates from different universities. Within universities changes...

The initial earnings of U.S. immigrants vary enormously by country of origin. Via three interrelated analyses, we show earnings convergence across source countries with time in the United States. Human-capital theory plausibly explains the inverse relationship between initial earnings and...

This paper reports estimates of the UK college premiumʺ for young graduates across successive cohorts from large cross section datasets for the UK pooled from 1994 to 2006 - a period when the higher education participation rate increased dramatically. The growth in relative labour demand...

Two radically different descriptions of immigrant earnings trajectories in the U.S. have emerged. One asserts that immigrant men following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act have low initial earnings and high earnings growth. Another asserts that post-1965 immigrants have low initial...

This paper explores the short and long run effects of career interruptions on wages for young skilled workers in West Germany. The analysis distinguishes four types of career interruptions: unemployment, parental leave for female workers, national service for male workers and other non-work...