This paper estimates the contribution of human capital to the Black-white earnings gap in three separate samples of men spanning from 1966 through 2017, using both educational attainment and performance on standardized tests to measure human capital. There are three main findings. First, the...

A commonly held perception is that an elite graduate degree can "scrub" a less prestigious but less costly undergraduate degree. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates from 2003 through 2017, this paper examines the relationship between the status of undergraduate degrees and...

We examine the evolution of the returns to human capital in Canada over the period 1980-2005. Our main finding is that returns to education increased substantially for Canadian men, contrary to conclusions reached previously. Most of this rise took place in the early 1980s and since 1995....

We estimate the impact of schooling on monthly earnings from 1950 to 2000 in Romania. Nearly constant at about 3-4% during the socialist period, the coefficient on schooling in a conventional earnings regression rises steadily during the 1990s, reaching 8.5% by 2000. Our analysis finds little...

We propose a new methodology for analyzing determinants of the wage gap between immigrants and natives. A Mincerian regression framework is extended to include GDP per capita in an immigrant's country of birth as a proxy for the quality of schooling and work experience acquired in that country....

This paper examines the wage effects of different types of career interruptions. We consider the timing and duration of non-employment spells by exploiting an administrative data set of German social security accounts (IAB employment sample) supplemented with information on the employees? entire...

In this paper we use a large official employer-employee dataset, which includes almost the whole universe of business firms, to document and decompose the rising graduates postgraduates' wage differentials in Portugal. Using a non-parametric matching exercise, we pay particular attention to...

In this paper we use a large official employer-employee dataset, which includes almost the whole universe of business firms, to document and decompose the rising graduates postgraduates' wage differentials in Portugal. Using a non-parametric matching exercise, we pay particular attention to...

This paper examines the wage effects of different types of career interruptions. We consider the timing and duration of non-employment spells by exploiting an administrative data set of German social security accounts (IAB employment sample) supplemented with information on the employees' entire...

This paper studies the impact of exam luck on individuals’ education and labor market success. We leverage unique features of the Norwegian education system that produce random variation in the content of the exams taken by students at the end of high school. Lucky students take exams in...