This paper analyses the effects of labour market expectations and admission probabilities on students' application strategies to higher education. The starting hypothesis of this study is that students consider the expected utility of their choices, a function of expected net lifetime earnings...

This paper investigates to what extent changes in the returns to occupational skill and declining occupational segregation have reduced wage inequality between men and women. As a first pass, I find that roughly 65% of the decline in the gender wage gap between 1985 and 2010 can be explained by...

We show that data on subjective expectations, especially on outcomes from counterfactual choices and choice probabilities, are a powerful tool in recovering ex ante treatment effects as well as preferences for different treatments. In this paper we focus on the choice of occupation, and use...

This paper develops a dynamic model of schooling and occupational choices that incorporates personality traits, as measured by the "big five" traits. The model is estimated using the HILDA dataset from Australia. Personality traits are found to play an important role in explaining education and...

This paper analyses the wage premia associated with workers' occupational use of foreign languages in Germany. After eliminating time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity and other confounding factors, sizable returns of about 10 percent to applying fluent English skills are found. Returns to...