Using new job requirements data for Britain I show that there has been a rise in various forms of communication tasks: influencing and literacy tasks have grown especially fast, as have self-planning tasks. External communication tasks, and numerical tasks have also become more important, but...

This paper introduces a new generic metric for the skill content of jobs, based on Spenner's substantive complexity-autonomy/control model, but adding a third dimension, skill-intensity. Cross-sectional data from seven waves of HILDA, a large Australian panel survey, are analysed to show that...

The paper provides new evidence on the ability to work from home (WFH) for hundreds of Dutch occupations and examines how WFH is related to various occupation-specific characteristics. This is done by linking several publicly available datasets from Statistics Netherlands, which contain...

We use the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to analyse whether employed and unemployed job seekers are substitutes by comparing their individual characteristics and past (un)employment and job histories. Since the BHPS does not directly collect information on job search activities of...

Implementing performance pay requires that workers' output be measured. When measurement costs differ among firms, those with a measurement cost advantage choose to implement performance pay. They attract the best workers, and both the level and variability of compensation are higher at these...

The importance of the professional competence is frequently linked with periods of economic crisis. The same can be said for the process of globalisation and the transformation of production activity as a result of the continuous development in the information technologies and automation that...

People are inaccurate judges of how their abilities compare to others'. Kruger and Dunning (1999; 2002) argue that most inaccuracy is attributable to unskilled performers' lack of metacognitive skill to evaluate their performance. They overestimate their standing, whereas skilled performers...

With the use of comparable data from seven West African capitals, we attempt to assess the rationale behind development policies targeting high rates of school enrolment through the prism of allocation of labour and returns to skills across the formal and informal sectors. We find that people...

The recent literature on externalities of schooling in the U.S. is rather mixed: positive external effects of average education are hardly found at all, while often positive externalities from the share of college graduates are identified. This paper proposes a simple model to explain this fact...

Higher oil-price shocks benefit unskilled workers relative to skilled workers: At the businesscycle frequency, energy prices and the skill premia display a strong, negative correlation. We assess the robustness of this negative correlation using several methods and data sources, including...