In this paper we investigate the effects of subsidizing low-skilled, labourintensive services hired by high-skilled individuals in the presence of labour income taxation. Whether such a subsidy can be Paretoimproving depends crucially on the degree of substitutability of both types of labour in...

Market imperfections may cause firms and workers to under-invest in specific training. This paper shows that profit sharing may be a suitable instrument to enhance specific training investments, either by enhancing wage °exibility or by increasing the returns to training. As a result, profit...

Because their departures are difficultly observed, little is known about the performance of immigrants who leave their adoptive homeland.This paper shows conditions under which the (conditional) outmigration probability, work probability and the expected earnings of outmigrants are...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of school quality on performance in national exams and the career decision at age 16. We use micro data for the UK, which provides a rich set of variables on parental background, previous achievements, and community variables. We find that,...

Abstract: We investigate whether and how the type of unemployment bene t institution affects productivity. We designed a field experiment to compare workers' productivity under a welfare system, where the unemployed receive an unconditional monetary transfer, with their productivity under a...

Recent human capital theories predict that labor market frictions and product market competition influence firm-sponsored training. Using matched worker-firm data from Dutch manufacturing, our paper empirically assesses the validity of these predictions. We find that a decrease in labor market...

Abstract: This paper investigates the importance of parents reading to their young children. Using Australian data we find that parental reading to children at age 4 to 5 has positive and significant effects on reading skills and cognitive skills of these children at least up to age 10 or 11....

By analyzing earnings of observed immigrants workers, the literature on the economic assimilation of immigrants has generally overlooked two potentially important selectivity issues.First, earnings of immigrant workers may di¿er substantially from those of non-workers.Second, earnings of...

It is nowadays widely believed that public schooling may contribute favourably to long-term economic growth. The income tax rates that are needed to finance government spending typically show an erratic time pattern. Such tax randomness could increase the intensity of the business cycle. Thus,...