This paper analyses the effects of labour market expectations and admission probabilities on students' application strategies to higher education. The starting hypothesis of this study is that students consider the expected utility of their choices, a function of expected net lifetime earnings...

This paper investigates to what extent changes in the returns to occupational skill and declining occupational segregation have reduced wage inequality between men and women. As a first pass, I find that roughly 65% of the decline in the gender wage gap between 1985 and 2010 can be explained by...

We examine the impact of sector-specific minimum wages in Germany on the willingness of youths to undergo vocational training. The theoretical intuition on the impact of wage floors on education is ambiguous. On the one hand, they raise the opportunity cost of education and prevent further skill...

Whether individuals choose occupations that teach general or specific skills can have important implications on how protected they are from changing conditions on the labor market. This paper looks at the impact of growing up in a region exposed to structural change caused by import competition...

This paper analyses the wage premia associated with workers' occupational use of foreign languages in Germany. After eliminating time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity and other confounding factors, sizable returns of about 10 percent to applying fluent English skills are found. Returns to...