T.W. Schultz (1975) proposed that returns to human capital were highest in economic environments where technology, price or production shocks were common and managerial skills to adapt resource allocations to those shocks were most in need. We hypothesize that variation in returns to human...

Recent empirical evidence seems to show that temporary migration is a widespread phenomenon, espe- cially among highly skilled workers who return to their countries of origin when these begin to grow. This paper develops a simple, tractable overlapping generations model that provides a rationale...

This study provides recent estimates of returns to education in transition countries, investigating how the economic boom in the region has affected these returns. We find that transition countries continue to have relatively low returns to education and that the economic boom did not lead to a...

With the UK's cap on tuition fees due to rise to £9,000, Gill Wyness looks at the impact of past fee increases on young people's decisions to go to university.

In the present paper we study the evolution of wage inequality in Uruguay from 1981 to 2007. To identify the main forces behind wage inequality evolution we apply the decomposition methodology proposed by Lemieux (2002). This methodology puts together the identification of the “price” effect...

The estimation of the economic return to education has perhaps been one of the predominant areas of analysis in applied economics for over 50 years. In this short note we consider some of the recent directions taken by the literature, and also some of the blockages faced by both science and...

In this article we investigate whether inequality in the inter-industry wage premia may be explained by unobserved differences in workers' educational skills. We use the last 2007 wave of EU-SILC data set for Portugal, a nation which can be considered a case-study, due to its traditional high...

Evidence based on the data from the 2004-2008 Household Labor Surveys, demonstrates the existence of within sector knowledge spillovers in Turkey. Estimates from a two step regressions confirm prior findings for different countries. Job tenure proxying for on the job training is a source of...

This papers contains a survey of the recent literature devoted to the returns to schooling within a dynamic structural framework. I present a historical perspective on the evolution of the literature, from early static models set in a selectivity framework (Willis and Rosen, 1979) to the recent...