We examine the extent to which education is a main determinant of affluence in Brazil. We focus on workers in the top 1% of the labor earnings distribution. We use university courses data from the Sample Questionnaire of the 2010 Census. Our main conclusion is that while education may be...

How valuable are cognitive and social abilities for entrepreneurs’ incomes as compared to employees? We answer three questions: (1) To what extent does a composite measure of ability affect an entrepreneur's earnings relative to employees? (2) Do different cognitive abilities (e.g. math...

How valuable is education for entrepreneurs’ performance as compared to employees’? What might explain any differences? And does education affect peoples’ occupational choices accordingly? We answer these questions based on a large panel of US labor force participants. We show that...

Are people prone to selecting occupations with highly skewed income distributions despite minuscule chances of success? Assembling a comprehensive pool of potential teenage entrants into professional tennis (a typical winner-take-all market), we construct objective measures of relative ability...

This doctoral thesis analyses the impact of education and other determinants on labour market outcomes using microeconometric methods. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction. Chapter 2 uses a randomised field experiment among German human resource managers to evaluate which skill signals such as...

Migration across well-developed countries has been overlooked in the immigration literature. The present study is designed to evaluate the interplay between the effects of host countries' characteristics and self-selection patterns of immigrants from a highly developed country on their economic...

Given asymmetric information, this paper explores the need for non-tenure-track jobs in academia alongside the usual tenure-track positions. It also explains the coexistence of these two types of jobs in research universities as an equilibrium phenomenon. The increased effort needed to produce...

As Canada increasingly structures itself towards a "knowledge based economy", the supply of high-skilled professionals such as engineers and other science graduates acquires more importance. Following the theoretical framework developed by Ryoo and Rosen(2004), we develop and estimate a dynamic...

The apprenticeship system is the most important source of formal post-secondary training in Germany. Our paper contributes to the ongoing debate as to why firms are willing to invest in such training even though many apprentices will leave the training firm soon after completion of the...

There is a considerable empirical literature which compares wage levels of workers who have studied at secondary vocational schools with wages of workers who took academic schooling. In general, vocational education does not lead to higher wages. However, in some countries where labor markets...