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 seeks to document and analyze changes in the distribution of wages and employment in the transition countries since the collapse of communism. Most countries experienced an increase in wage inequality during the initial shock of the transition. Proximate causes of this increase seem...

Estonia, which adopted relatively free labor market policies early in its transition, experienced rapid increases in returns to human capital Ntilde; rising returns to education and rising relative wages for younger educated workers, but declining returns to experience for older workers with...

Using three Bulgarian cross-sectional household surveys from 1986, 1993 and 1997, this essay shows that the mean log wage differential between ethnic Bulgarians and Turks increased from 0.1615 in 1986 to 0.2874 in 1993 and again to 0.4075 by 1997. Bulgarian gains over ethnic Turks in the early...

This paper uncovers evidence on the distribution of wages in Belarus in the second half of the 1990s. The returns to education and work experience are high and stable, which is atypical for a transition country. This might be due to the pervasive role of the state in fixing wages in the dominant...

We examine the role of potential residual revenue in determining the pay of skilled workers and enterprise directors relative to production workers in China's Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs) in the period from 1984 to 1990. The potential residual is proxied negatively by returns to scale...

We extract estimation results on the Mincer earnings function from four earlier studies and add new results from a recent dataset. We analyse differences related to differences in earnings concepts, in sampling frame and differences among studies that cannot be explained. Jointly, the studies...

This paper re-examines the wage returns to the 1972 Raising of the School Leaving Age (RoSLA) in England and Wales using a high-quality administrative panel dataset covering the relevant cohorts for almost 40 years of their labour market careers. With best practice regression discontinuity...

This paper utilizes the self-employed to analyze the observed increase in the educational earnings premium in the 1980's. The paper compares the predictions of the signaling and human capital models in response to an exogenous demand shock such as a skill-biased technological change. Since the...

Using data for the 1990's, this paper examines the role of sheepskin effects in the returns to education for Japan. Our estimations indicate that sheepskin effects explain about 50% of the total returns to schooling. We further find that sheepskin effects are only important for workers in small...