Policy changes in the United States in the 1990s resulted in sizable increases in employment rates of single mothers. We show that this increase led to a large and abrupt increase in work experience for single mothers with young children. We then examine the economic return to this increase in...

Labor markets in the UK have been characterized by markedly widening wage inequality for lowskill (non-college) women, a trend that predates the pandemic. We examine the contribution of job polarization to this trend by estimating age, period, and cohort effects for the likelihood of employment...

A two country model of trade between a flexiwage and a minimum wage economy or two mmjmum wage economies is developed. The main novelty is that there are three factors of production: capital, skilled and unskilled labour. This unlocks the terms of trade. Unskilled labour is subject to the same...

Using a large database of online job postings, we demonstrate that employee skill requirements rise when there is a larger supply of relevant job seekers. We identify this effect using variation across time, occupations, and places, which allows us to control for potentially confounding factors....

The Great Recession and subsequent recovery have been particularly painful for low-skilled workers. From 2007 to 2012, the unemployment rate rose by 6.4 percentage points for noncollege workers while it rose by only 2.3 percentage points for the college educated. This differential impact was...

With a focus on the role of cultural clustering and income distribution, this paper investigates whether standard determinants influence international migration of workers to France with the same intensity across different skill levels and with or without free mobility. We find that low-skill...

This report asks what is happening to middle-skill workers. Driven by mega trends such as automation, ageing and offshoring, the share of jobs whose wages placed them firmly in the middle of the wage distribution has been declining. Termed job polarisation, economists have observed the decline...

We examine how education expansions affect the job opportunities for workers with and without the new education. To identify causal effects, we exploit a quasi-random establishment of Universities of Applied Sciences (UASs), bachelor-granting three-year colleges that teach and conduct applied...

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...

This paper investigates the relationship between education and training provided by the firm, both on the job and off the job, using a unique dataset based on a survey of Thai employees conducted in the summer of 2001. We find a significant and negative relationship between educational...