The existing literature on training is concerned with understanding the reasons whyfirms pay for the general skills of their workers, but without explaining which firmstrain which workers. This paper develops a theory that both explains the willingnessof firms to pay for general training, and...

Garicano and Rossi-Hansberg (2003) show that knowledge-based hierarchies arecharacterized by positive sorting between workers and managers when knowledgeacquisition takes place before production. We extend the analysis and find thatcomplementarities between manager and worker skill are even...

The career prospects of newly recruited employees differ substantially within an organization.The stars experience a considerable growth in earnings; others can hardly maintain theirentry salaries. This article sheds light on the mechanisms generating the observedheterogeneity in earnings...

In 1958 Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand earnings distribution. In the years since Mincer?s seminal work, he as well as his students and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching important conclusions about a whole array of observations pertaining...

We formulate an empirical model of promotion with dynamic self-selection where the current promotion probability depends on the hierarchical level in the firm, individual human capital, unobserved (to the econometrician) individual specific attributes, time varying firm specific variables (firm...

We develop a rationale for the payment by firms of a wage premium on marginal, or overtime, weekly hours. We examine wage-hours contracts within the framework of a two-period specific human capital model with asymmetric information. The wage premium serves to achieve contract efficiency. For...

We present a theoretical explanation of the gender wage gap which turns on the interaction between men and women in households. In equilibria where men are over-represented in fulltime work, we show that firms rationally choose to hire women only at strictly lower wages than men. The model...

Thurow?s job-competition model implies that overeducation is contingent upon the differing skill endowments of employees. As yet, only rudimentary evidence has been furnished to confirm this relationship. In the present paper, we test the theory in a more sophisticated manner, by means of a more...

Becker?s theory of human capital predicts that minimum wages should reduce training investments for affected workers because they prevent these workers from taking wage cuts necessary to finance training. In contrast, in noncompetitive labor markets, minimum wages tend to increase training of...

In this paper we use important new training and wage data from the British Household Panel Survey to estimate the impact of the national minimum wage (introduced in April 1999) on the work-related training of low-wage workers. We use two ?treatment groups? for estimating the impact of the new...