This paper reports evidence that an individual meeting with a study counselor at high school significantly improves the quality of choice of tertiary educational field, as self-assessed 18 months after graduation from college. The results are strongest among males and those with low educated...

This paper analyzes the tendency of people to choose default options when offered courses to acquire job related skills. We ask a random sample of Dutch people aged 6-80 which three skills are most important in their (future or past) jobs. Further on in the survey, we randomly select one of the...

In this paper we study whether the presence of binding liquidity constraints and the existence of fixed costs can explain the underinvestment of parents in their children's human capital. We first incorporate these two potential mechanisms into the theoretical model of Raut & Tran (2005) and...

The labour market in Russia is very flexible. Firms adjust to economic shocks through wage cuts, working hour reductions and minimisation of non-wage labour costs. Workers react by changing jobs. This results in a high and stable overall employment rate, but also high wage inequality,...

The paper contrasts the pattern of returns to human capital in different economic sectors. As job mobility, especially across sectors, is limited, it is argued that coefficients of experience in earnings regressions may capture or be interpreted as the growth rate - net of depreciation - of...

Empleando la Encuesta de Estructura Salarial se plantea una propuesta de estimación de externalidades de capital humano intraempresa que permite relajar las restricciones introducidas por las especificaciones que la literatura empírica existente ha usado. En concreto, la metodología propuesta...

This paper studies the effects of a voluntary skill certification scheme in an online freelancing labour market. The paper show that obtaining skill certificates increases a worker’s earnings. This effect is not driven by increased worker productivity but by decreased employer uncertainty. The...

Considerable effort has been exercised in estimating mean returns to education while carefully considering biases arising from unmeasured ability and measurement error. Some recent work has also attempted to determine whether there are variations from the "mean" return to education across the...

We have developed a theoretical link between the existence of a son preference and the quantity and quality of children. In our model, decisions about the quantity and quality of children are interdependent and are influenced by a son preference. A son preference substantially widens the gap...

A simple model of informal learning on-the-job, which combines learning by oneself and learning from others, is proposed in this paper. It yields a closed-form solution that revises Mincer-Jovanovic's (1981) treatment of tenure in the human capital earnings function by relating earnings to the...