This paper explores the short and long run effects of career interruptions on wages for young skilled workers in West Germany. The analysis distinguishes four types of career interruptions: unemployment, parental leave for female workers, national service for male workers and other non-work...

Using the NLSY, we find that young Mexican women earn 9% less than young White women while young Black women earn 15% less than young White women. Although young Mexican women earn less than young White women, they do surprisingly well compared to young Black women. We show that it is crucially...

This paper examines how human capital based approaches explain the distribution of earnings. It assesses traditional, quasi-experimental, and new micro-based structural models, the latter of which gets at population heterogeneity by estimating individual-specific earnings function parameters....

Previous studies on gender wage discrimination have relied on OLS when estimating the wage equations. However, there exists a number of recent studies, devoted to estimating the return to education, that have shown that OLS may produce biased estimates for a number of reasons. Consequently, if...

Education is widely recognized as one of the most important determinants of earnings in the labour market. A main aspect of the relationship between education and earnings is the wage premium between workers with higher and lower education. The findings of previous studies show that changes in...

This paper applies parametric and nonparametric techniques to the most recent data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) 1992-2000 and shows the returns to schooling increased over the course of transition, overall and for attainment cohorts neither at the top nor bottom of the...

In 1958 Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand how earnings are distributed across the population. In the years since Mincer's seminal work, he as well as his students and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching important conclusions about a whole array...

Studying twelve countries over 30 years, we examine whether women's educational expansion has translated into a closing gender earnings gap. As educational attainment is cohortdependent, an Age-Period-Cohort analysis is most appropriate in our view. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data,...

Because students rely on their subjective expectations when choosing a college major, understanding this process of expectations formation is crucial for education policy recommendations. This paper focuses on how college students form expectations about various major-specific outcomes. I...

China's phenomenal growth is accompanied by both relatively low level of standards of living and high inequality. It is widely believe that investing in education could be an effective strategy to promote higher standards of living as well as to reduce inequality. However, little is known about...