This paper addresses the importance of compositional changes in the labor force for the development of the wage distribution. Demographic change and higher educational attainment imply a shift toward employees with more experience and/or better education. These groups are characterized by higher...

This paper studies the impact of exam luck on individuals’ education and labor market success. We leverage unique features of the Norwegian education system that produce random variation in the content of the exams taken by students at the end of high school. Lucky students take exams in...

In countries with high levels of inequality, progress in education has often been placed high in the list of policy proposals designed to change the unequal state of affairs. This study uses Brazilian annual data to chart the trends in wage inequality and a decomposition procedure to ascertain...

This paper investigates inequality and intragenerational economic mobility in a developing country with large inequality. Understanding economic mobility is important because it shapes our perception of inequality. Despite its significance, evidence on intragenerational mobility, especially that...

The rational expectations assumption, e.g. in life-cycle models and portfolio-choice models, prescribes agents to have model-consistent beliefs and to avoid systematic prediction errors. In reality, justi cation and identification of expectations are nontrivial. One way to solve this problem is...

The rational expectations assumption, e.g. in life-cycle models and portfolio-choice models, prescribes agents to have model-consistent beliefs and to avoid systematic prediction errors. In reality, justi cation and identification of expectations are nontrivial. One way to solve this problem is...

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 study examines the correlation between childhood poverty and its influence on adulthood wage distribution, where childhood poverty refers to experience of poverty or poor family background during one's childhood. With the data from Korean Labor Income Panel Study, KLIPS, quantile regression...

We apply a recently proposed method to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from risk in returns to education. We replicate the original study on US men and extend to US women, UK men and German men. Most original results are not robust. A college education cannot universally be considered an...