Social mobility is a key element of meritocratic societies. We analyze multigenerational social mobility with a hand-collected yearly Swiss dataset from 1550 to 2019. With our surname-based approach, we measure the Swiss society's overall permeability over more than 450 years. Furthermore, we...

Grandparents act as the third biggest care giver besides day care and parental care for children below the age of 6 in most OECD countries. Despite its relevance, the effects of child care provided by grandparents on child and parental outcomes have received little attention in the literature....

Redistributive taxation and education subsidies are common policies intended to foster education attendance of poor children. However, this paper shows that in an intergenerational framework, these policies can raise social mobility only for some investment situations but not in general. I also...

This paper assesses the role of literacy skills as an equalizer in both educational outcomes and educational opportunities. First, by linking two surveys of adult skills for 11 OECD countries (PIAAC - Survey of Adult Skills (conducted in mid-90s) and IALS - International Adult Literacy Survey...

There is considerable debate on whether the prospects of entering a high-paid job are better for those in low-paid jobs compared to the unemployed. Whilst some scholars argue that there is a scarring effect of unemployment others highlight that low pay might signal a low productivity and...

This paper intends to analyse to what extent does a worker who, along with a job move undergoes a spatial move, gain a wage increase. For that matter, a sample of Quadros de Pessoal is used with information gathered regarding all the workers that are part of those tables, simultaneously for the...

We use a large linked employer-employee data set to analyze the importance of relative wage positions in the context of individual quit decisions as an inverse measure of job satisfaction. Our main findings are: (1) Workers with higher relative wage positions within their firms are on average...

Economic conditions at the time of labour market entry can induce wage differentials between workers entering the labour market at different points in time. While there exists much empirical evidence on the existence and persistence of the effects of labour market entry conditions, little is...

This paper analyse how previous experience and affiliation influence individual employees but also the current employers. Knowledge can be embodied in several different forms, in individuals, in books, in machines, or in processes. Human capital refers to embodied knowledge in individuals,...

This paper presents an analytical setup that makes predictions for the relationships between firm and occupation specific human capital and job switches. The predictions are then tested using the task based approach. The results, based on data for Germany, show that the degree to which firm...