Even in OECD countries, where an increasing proportion of the workforce has a university degree, the value of basic skills in literacy and numeracy remains high. Indeed, in some countries the return for such skills, in the form of higher wages, is sufficiently large to suggest that they are in...

I use administrative and survey data from Chile and a structural model to evaluate teacher policies in a market-based school system. The model accommodates equilibrium effects on parental sorting across school sectors (public or private), on the self-selection of individuals into teaching and...

I use a structural matching model, North Carolina public school data, and a survey of teachers' career plans to analyze schools' and teachers' behaviors in the teacher transfer market. Results show that mid-career teachers with better pre-service qualifications are the most eager to search,...

Using data from social security records and an event study approach, we estimate the child penalty in Spain, looking at disparities for women and men across different labor outcomes following the birth of the first child. Our findings show that, the year after the first child is born, mothers’...

We have shown that vocational education does not perform as well as academic education both in labour market outcomes and in the level of basic skills, including literacy and numeracy. This is especially true for higher education. Only at the upper secondary or post-secondary level does...

This study investigates whether working time accounts affect the performance of German establishments based on the Establishment Panel from the Institute for Employment Research. The major results are: productivity and investments are positively correlated with working time accounts. No...