A commonly held perception is that an elite graduate degree can “scrub” a less prestigious but less costly undergraduate degree. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates from 2003 through 2017, this paper examines the relationship between the status of undergraduate degrees...

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...

This paper examines the influence of educational mismatch on wages according to workers' region of birth, taking advantage of our access to rich matched employer-employee data for the Belgian private sector for the period 1999-2010. Using a fine-grained approach to measuring educational mismatch...

This paper analyses the wage effects of educational mismatch by workers' origin using a sizeable, detailed matched employer-employee dataset for Belgium. Relying on a fine-grained approach to measuring educational mismatch, the results show that over-educated workers, regardless of their origin,...

A commonly held perception is that an elite graduate degree can "scrub" a less prestigious but less costly undergraduate degree. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates from 2003 through 2017, this paper examines the relationship between the status of undergraduate degrees and...

A commonly held perception is that an elite graduate degree can "scrub" a less prestigious but less costly undergraduate degree. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates from 2003 through 2017, this paper examines the relationship between the status of undergraduate degrees and...

The literature shows a wage premium for graduates from high quality, elite, or more selective universities. The results, however, exist for countries with a clear hierarchy of top universities, such as the US, England, and Australia. I evaluate if such an effect also exists in Germany, a country...

The aim of this paper is to quantify how much of the initial wage differentials of young workers is explained by the secondary school they attended, and to disentangle the (descriptive) channels contributing to these differences. The analysis is based on the HUN-REN CERS Admin3 database, taking...

Even in OECD countries, where an increasing proportion of the workforce has a university degree, the value of basic skills in literacy and numeracy remains high. Indeed, in some countries the return for such skills, in the form of higher wages, is sufficiently large to suggest that they are in...

Economics has been shown to be a relatively high earning college major, but geographic differences in earnings have been largely overlooked. This paper uses the American Community Survey to examine geographic differences in both absolute earnings and relative earnings for economic majors. We...