What happens to wage inequality when a country begins to trade and industrialize? I construct new wage series for China from 1858 to 1936. I collect the nominal wages from the records of the China Maritime Customs, and estimate real wages for unskilled and skilled workers using new...

Rapid education expansion and rising income inequality are two striking phenomena occurring in China during the transitional period. Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) data collected in 1997 and 2006, this paper studies how education affects individual earnings during the...

We study how formal education and experience in the labour market correlate with measures of human capital available in thirteen countries participating in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC), an international study assessing adults' proficiency in numeracy...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

This study provides the first set of estimates of the returns to schooling over an extended period in Russia and Ukraine (1985-2002). There has been an increase in returns to schooling in both countries but the increase is much bigger in Russia than in Ukraine. The intriguing question is why...

Endogenous, ideas-led growth theory and the literature on agent-based modeling with neighborhood effects are crossed. In an economic overlapping generations framework, it is shown how social interactions and neighborhood effects are of vital importance in the endogenous determination of the long...

This paper calculates new measures of human capital. Contrary to the existing literature, they are based on realistic rates of return to education, which are allowed to vary substantially across countries and to some extent over time. The new measures perform well in regression analysis...

In a meritocratic society an individual's economic success is determined by their ability, not by their parents' socio-economic status. We assess whether meritocracy has increased in both the British education system and labour market. The richness of our longitudinal data enables us to look at...