Previous studies report that adult height has significant associations with wages even controlling for schooling. But schooling and height are imperfect measures of adult cognitive skills (“brains”) and strength (“brawn”); further they are not exogenous. Analysis of rich Guatemalan...

This paper investigates how much of the difference in wage distributions is related to differences in skill distributions and whether a compressed wage distribution is associated with high unemployment across core OECD countries. Some countries that have more compressed (dispersed) wage...

Family background can influence offspring earnings in two ways: conditioning their educational attainments (indirect effect) and circumscribing their opportunities in the labour market, independently from their educational attainment (direct effect). In this paper, following a multi-steps...

Based on a law enacted in November 1999, males born on or before December 31st 1972 are given the option to benefit from a paid exemption from compulsory military service in Turkey. Exploiting this natural experiment, we devise an empirical strategy to estimate the intention-to-treat effect of...

We review the theories put forward, methodological approaches used, and empirical conclusions found in the multidisciplinary literature on the relationship between student employment and educational outcomes. A systematic comparison of the empirical work yields new insights that go beyond the...

This paper investigates international differences in wage inequality and skills and whether a compressed wage distribution is associated with high unemployment across core OECD countries. Wage dispersion and wage structure are widely debated among policymakers; compressed wage structure is often...

We explore whether the choice of broad versus specialized university curricula affects subsequent labor market outcomes, as measured by earnings, full-time permanent employment, and unemployment six months after university graduation. We exploit a unique episode in the history of the National...

We study the earnings and employment effects of enrollment in formal adult education in Finland using a combination of matching and panel data methods. We also conduct cost-benefit analyses. The results show that adult education increases earnings and employment both in secondary and higher...

In this paper, we identify female long-term wage returns to college education using the educational expansion between 1960-1990 in West Germany as exogenous variation for college enrollment. We estimate marginal treatment effects to learn about the underlying behavioral structure of women who...

In this paper, we identify female long-term wage returns to college education using the educational expansion between 1960-1990 inWest Germany as exogenous variation for college enrollment. We estimate marginal treatment effects to learn about the underlying behavioral structure of women who...