SBTC is a powerful mechanism in explaining the increasing gap between educated and uneducated wages. However, SBTC cannot mimic the US within-group wage inequality. This paper provides an explanation for the observed intra-college group inequality by showing that the top decile earners’...

This paper contributes to the literature by separately analysing the signalling (or sheepskin) effects of the enrolment in and the completion of vocational education and training as well as higher education. Moreover, we investigate the persistence of these sheepskin effects over time. We take...

What happens to wage inequality when a country begins to trade and industrialize? I construct new wage series for China from 1858 to 1936. I collect the nominal wages from the records of the China Maritime Customs, and estimate real wages for unskilled and skilled workers using new...

SBTC is a powerful mechanism in explaining the increasing gap between educated and uneducated wages. However, SBTC cannot mimic the US within-group wage inequality. This paper provides an explanation for the observed intra-college group inequality by showing that the top decile earners'...

Central exams are often hypothesized to favorably affect incentive structures in schools. Indeed, previous research provides vast evidence on the positive effects of central exams on student test scores. But critics warn that these effects may arise through the strategic behavior of students and...

We examine earnings records for 90,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001–02 and 2006–07 school years, roughly 20,000 of whom left teaching during that time. Among grade 4–8 teachers leaving for other industries, a 1 standard deviation increase in...

This paper shows that returns to education are not enough to capture all the returns to human capital. Using longitudinal data of all college graduates in Colombia, we estimate labor market returns to postsecondary degrees and to various skills— including literacy, numeracy, foreign language,...

We study how the tasks conducted on the job relate to measures of cognitive skills using data from 18 countries participating in the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC) and from 13 countries that also participate in the International Adult Literacy Study...

We comment on the work of Hanushek et al. (2015) and show that returns to skills are very heterogeneous and depend crucially on the tasks performed in the workplace, in line with the critique by Acemoglu and Autor (2011). Depending on the type of tasks performed at work, as well as on...

Despite a global trend of wage decentralization over the past 30 years, we know very little about the labor market implications of decentralized wage determination. A main reason is the lack of exogenous variation in wage regulation linked to detailed outcome data. Using Swedish registry data...