Matched employee-employer data from the UK are used to investigate the importance of social skills, in particular team-work and communication with co-workers, as a driver of wage growth for workers with lower formal education. We find that in social skills tasks, workers enjoy greater wage...

High-paying factory jobs in the 1940s were an engine of egalitarian economic growth for a generation. Are there alternate forms of work organization that deliver similar benefits for frontline workers? Work organization varies by type of complexity and degree of employer control. Technical and...

We study how formal education and experience in the labour market correlate with measures of human capital available in thirteen countries participating in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC), an international study assessing adults' proficiency in numeracy...

This paper develops and estimates an individual model of occupational choice and learning that allows for correlated learning across occupation-specific abilities. As an individual learns about their occupation-specific ability in one occupation, this experience will be broadly informative about...

Different types of labor and capital inputs have varying productive contributions that are dependent on plant characteristics. We estimate such contributions and their underlying determinants, recognizing the interactions among labor and capital components that reflect their substitutability or...

This study seeks to distinguish among competing theories of urbanization in an explanation of recent, massive rural-to-urban migration in China. Specifically, the research evaluates whether Chinese urbanization following the 1990s liberalization of mobility and residential location restrictions...

This paper investigates basic relationships between technology and occupations. Building a general occupational model, I look at detailed occupations since 1980 to explore whether computers are related to job losses or other sources of wage inequality. Occupations that use computers grow faster,...

This paper examines the determinants of occupational attainment and the impact of occupation on earnings. Results for both the native born and foreign born are presented, and these provide insights as to the earnings penalties associated with the less-than-perfect international transferability...

The US labour market is characterized by a high skill wage mark-up and low unemployment, while the German labour market has a low skill wage mark-up and a high, mainly unskilled unemployment rate. This paper adds an innovative labour supply explanation to the discussion how these distinct labour...

We argue that productive firms share rents with workers only in occupations where workers have individual hold-up power. We present a model of wage determination where firms produce using a novel generalization of Kremer (1993)'s O-ring production function. Workers have individual hold-up power...