This paper focuses on the effect of educational and skill mismatches of workers on overall job satisfaction, and on certain job domains such as salary, number of working hours, promotion opportunities and type of activity performed. An ordered probit model is estimated by using a data set from...

Policymakers in many OECD countries are increasingly concerned about high and rising inequality. Much of the evidence (as far back as Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) points to the importance of skills in tackling wage inequality. Yet a recent strand of the research argues that (cognitive)...

Standard economic theory suggests that individuals know best how to make themselves happy. Thus, policies designed to encourage “better” behaviors will only reduce people’s happiness. Recently, however, economists have explored the role of impatience, especially difficulties with delaying...

About one in five workers across OECD countries is employed part-time, and the share has been steadily increasing since the beginning of the economic and financial crisis in 2007. Part-time options play an important economic role by providing more flexible working arrangements for both workers...

In Europe, about one in eight people of working age report having a disability; that is, the presence of a long-term limiting health condition. Despite the introduction of a range of legislative and policy initiatives designed to eliminate discrimination and facilitate retention of and entry...

A pieceworker receives a fixed rate for each unit (“piece”) produced or action performed. In part, the rate reflects a cost of monitoring output. A timeworker receives a fixed wage rate per hour that, in the short term, does not vary with output performance. From the 18th century up to the...

Family and kinship networks are important in helping people get jobs and start companies, as statistics for developing countries show. Promising new research has begun to assess the positive and negative effects of these family and kinship ties on entrepreneurial success. To what extent, and...

Should one expect a worker’s productivity, and thus wage, to depend on the productivity of his/her co-workers in the same workplace, even if the workers carry out completely independent tasks and do not engage in team work? This may well be the case because social interaction among co-workers...

The utilization and reward of the human capital of immigrants in the labor market of the host country has been studied extensively. Using Swedish register data from 2001 - 2008, we extend the immigrant educational mismatch literature by analyzing incidence, wage effects and state dependence in...

This paper brings new evidence to the existing literature on earnings differentials and returns to human capital for immigrants and natives. It is the first paper analysing this topic using data drawn from the Italian Labour Force Survey, a large nationally representative dataset. We show that...