Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” years saw GDP per capita rise from 60% of the EU average to 120% of the average over the course of the 1990s, with a growth in employment of about 40% over the period 1994-2001. What were the consequences of the boom for returns to education and wage inequality?...

The use of genetic markers as instrumental variables (IV) is receiving increasing attention from economists. This paper examines the conditions that need to be met for genetic variants to be used as instruments. We combine the IV literature with that from genetic epidemiology, with an...

This paper uses quantile regression techniques to analyze heterogeneous patterns of return to education across the conditional wage distribution in four transition countries. We correct for sample selection bias using a procedure suggested by Buchinsky (2001), which is based on a Newey (1991,...

A parallel of education with transformative processes in standard markets suggest that a more severe control of the quality of the output will improve the overall quality of the education. This paper shows a somehow counterintuitive result: an increase in the exam diffculty may reduce the...

This paper reviews the problems and potential benefits of integrating personality psychology into economics. Economists have much to learn from and contribute to personality psychology. -- personality psychology ; behavioral economics ; identification ; causality

This paper explores the power of personality traits both as predictors and as causes of academic and economic success, health, and criminal activity. Measured personality is interpreted as a construct derived from an economic model of preferences, constraints, and information. Evidence is...

The academic circles are devoting a growing interest to delayed graduation and overeducation, but none has analyzed the joint consequences of these two phenomena. Thus, this paper studies the link between graduation not within the minimum period and overeducation, and the effects of these...

Evidence about job mobility outside the U.S. is scarce and difficult to compare cross-nationally because of non-uniform data. We document job mobility patterns of college graduates in their first three years in the labor market, using unique uniform data covering 11 European countries and Japan....

This paper proposes and estimates a model of demand for and supply of graduations in tertiary education, which is then used to construct forward-looking scenarios for graduation rates by country. Consistent with evidence that economic returns to education have remained high in spite of rising...

The labour market in Russia is very flexible. Firms adjust to economic shocks through wage cuts, working hour reductions and minimisation of non-wage labour costs. Workers react by changing jobs. This results in a high and stable overall employment rate, but also high wage inequality,...