This paper is based on four axis questions that search for possible answers to understand the role of education in the knowledge society. The given questions are: How to upgrade education to respond to the needs of the 21st century? What principles that lead to creating innovative perspective...

This paper studies how demographics affect aggregate labor market power, the urban wage premium and the spatial concentration of population. I develop a quantitative spatial model in which labor market competitiveness depends on the demographic composition of the local workforce. Using highly...

Wages and productivity represent two of the most relevant variables to consider in economic development. Given the low productivity levels that emerging countries reveal, the accumulation of productive capabilities and a narrower dispersion across sectors would enable emerging countries to...

This paper studies the impact of knowledge specialization on earnings losses following displacement. We develop a novel measure of the specialization of human capital, based on how concentrated the knowledge used in an occupation is. Combining our measure with individual labor histories from the...

I document novel stylized facts on learning and its relationship with population density, using Japanese survey data that provide distinctively rich first-hand information about the frequency, purpose, subject, and method of off-the-job learning. First, people learn more frequently in denser...

We study the joint design of nonlinear income and education taxes when the government pursues redistributive objectives. A key feature of our setup is that the ability type of an agent can affect both the costs and benefits of acquiring education. Market remuneration of agents depends on both...

This paper presents a model of the labor market where public workfares increase private wages by reducing labor supply. In a dynamic setting, we show that when wages are downwardly rigid, forward-looking employers optimally compress wage increases in response to intertemporal variability in the...

Young people of working age tend to be particularly prone to labor market inefficiencies that keep their wages excessively high and their employment excessively low. These inefficiencies are usually magnified through unemployment benefit systems. This paper examines how these problems can be...

This paper proposes a method of measuring chronic and transitory poverty based on any additively-decomposable index of aggregate poverty. Chronic poverty and transitory poverty in the United States are measured using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1987 interviewing year). In an...

This paper uses matched employer-employee data from the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to changes in wage inequality within and across industries between 1992 and 2003. We find that the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers and...