This paper uses a state of the art three-stage technique to identify the characteristics of the self-employed immigrant and native men in Germany and to understand their underlying drive into self-employment. Employing data from the German Socioeconomic Panel 2000 release we find that...

Career positions in German economic life are still male-dominated, and the driving forces behind success are not yet well understood. This paper contributes to a better understanding by classifying success stories in self-employment and business careers, and by investigating differences between...

Are workers with poor outside opportunities less responsive and more susceptible to negative demand shifts in routine occupations? To answer this, I create and estimate an occupation specialization index (OSI) using Swedish register data and machine learning tools. It measures the expected...

The transition towards a greener, less carbon-intensive economy leads to a growing demand for green products, services and business processes. In theory, this trend should lead to a greening of jobs, i.e. to an increasing share of environmentally friendly requirements within occupations...

This paper analyses the determinants and consequences of horizontal job-education mismatches, an increasingly relevant topic in debates about education and labour markets. This issue reflects the articulation of educational fields and occupations in the labour market. We evaluate the...

Empirical work in economics stresses the importance of unobserved firm- and person-level characteristics in the determination of wages, finding that these unobserved components account for the overwhelming majority of variation in wages. However, little is known about the mechanisms sustaining...

Using data from a Microsoft survey and the Current Population Survey, we examine the returns to Microsoft Certification in early 2000’s. The formal structure of Microsoft Certification provides a well documented external measure of computer skills rather than the ad-hoc self reports used in...

This study examines changes in returns to formal education and cognitive skills over the last 20 years using the 1979 and 1997 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We show that cognitive skills had a 30%-50% larger effect on wages in the 1980s than in the 2000s. Returns to...

The paper examines the determinants of the division of labor within firms. It provides an explanation of the pervasive observed changes in work organization away from the traditional functional departments and towards multi-tasking and job rotation. Whereas the existing literature on the...

This paper presents new evidence on the evolution of job polarisation over time and across skill groups in Spain between 1994 and 2008. Spain has experienced job polarisation over the whole period, with growth at the upper part of the wage distribution always exceeding that in the lower part....