This paper focuses on education and skills mismatch amongst Italian graduates. Indicators for over and under-utilisation of education and under-utilisation of skills are included in a grouped data lognormal wage equation, allowing us to test a number of theories which could explain the effect of...

Atypical work, or alternative work arrangements in U.S. parlance, has long been criticized in popular debate as providing poorly-compensated employment. Although the early U.S. literature seemed to confirm this perception, more recent cet. par. analysis has offered a partial but somewhat more...

This paper tracks the rise in the percentage of employees who have never become union members (¿nevermembers¿) since the early 1980s and shows that it is the reduced likelihood of ever becoming a member rather than the haemorrhaging of existing members which is behind the decline in overall...

This paper explains why some employees who favor unionization fail to join, and why others who wish to abandon union membership continue paying dues. Our explanation is based on a model where employees incur switching (search) costs when attempting to abandon (acquire) union membership....

In the UK the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but after ten years after labour market entry, there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points. This paper explores the reason for this gender gap in early-career wage growth, considering three main hypotheses -...

Most welfare programs generate high marginal tax rates on labor income. This paper uses a representative sample of individuals on France's main welfare program (the Revenu Minimum d'Insertion, or RMI) to estimate monetary gains to employment for welfare recipients. This is based on the...

A recurrent topic in labor economics is that of the existence of comparative advantages derived from the heterogeneity of both workers and tasks. This paper overcomes the standard problem of insufficient data to test comparative advantages by employing th

The essential idea of equilibrium search models of labor market behavior is that wage policy matters. In this paper we provide for estimating equilibrium search models using a non-parametric estimator of heterogeneity.

Work-related training is considered to be very important for providing the workforce with the necessary skills for maintaining and enhancing the competitiveness of the firms and the economy. According to the classical human capital theory general training is entirely financed by workers. This...

This paper provides an explanation of the evolution and persistence of the gender wage gap due to differences in training within the framework of an overlapping generations model with intergenerational transmission of preferences. "Job-priority" and "family-priority" preferences are considered....