The Skills Toward Employment and Productivity (STEP) Survey is an initiative of the World Bank in cooperation with other development partners and nongovernmental agencies and carried out in more than 14 countries globally. In Ghana, the first phase of the survey focusing on adults in urban...

"The Skills Toward Employment and Productivity (STEP) Survey is an initiative of the World Bank in cooperation with other development partners and nongovernmental agencies and carried out in more than 14 countries globally. In Ghana, the first phase of the survey focusing on adults in urban...

Wage growth is stronger in larger cities, but this relationship holds exclusively for non-manual workers. Using rich German administrative data, I study the heterogeneity in the pecuniary value of big city experience, a measure of dynamic agglomeration economies, and its consequences for the...

This paper analyzes job referral effects that are based on residential location. We use georeferenced record data for the entire working population (liable to social security) and the corresponding establishments in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area, which is Germany's largest (and EU's second...

Your very private job agency: Job referrals based on residential location networks This paper analyzes job referral effects that are based on residential location. We use georeferenced record data for the entire working population (liable to social security) and the corresponding establishments...

In most countries, average wages tend to be higher in larger cities. In this paper, we focus on the role played by the matching of workers to firms in explaining geographical wage differences. Using rich administrative German data for 1985-2014, we show that wages in large cities are higher not...

This paper views teacher quality through the human capital perspective. Teacher quality exhibits substantial growth over teachers’ careers, but why it improves is not well understood. I use a human capital production function nesting On-the-Job-Training (OJT) and Learning-by-Doing (LBD) and...

This paper studies how linear tax and education policy should optimally respond to skill-biased technical change (SBTC). SBTC affects optimal taxes and subsidies by changing i) direct distributional benefits, ii) indirect redistributional effects due to wage-(de)compression, and iii) education...

This paper reports estimates of the UK “college premium” 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. This implies that graduate supply...

This paper estimates the return to education using two alternative instrumental variable estimators: one exploits variation in schooling associated with early smoking behaviour, the other uses the raising of the minimum school leaving age. Each instrument estimates a 'local average treatment...