This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the relationship between wage inequality, employment structure, and returns to education in urban areas of Mexico during the past two decades (1987-2008). Applying Melly's (2005) quantile regression based decomposition, we find that changes in wage...

Large imbalances between the supply and demand for skills in transition economies are driven by rapid economic restructuring, misalignment of the education system with labor market needs, and underdeveloped adult education and training systems. The costs of mismatches can be large and...

This paper investigates whether and in what sense the west German wage structure has been "rigid" in the 1990s. To test the hypothesis that a rigid wage structure has been responsible for rising low-skilled unemployment, I propose a methodology which makes less restrictive identifying...

This paper provides precise figures on the incidence and wage penalties of mismatching in Germany. We use the BIBB/BAuA Employment Survey 2006 to compute two different measures of person-to-job matching. A first measure indicates an educational (mis)match, i.e., whether a worker’s attained...