This paper presents an empirical analysis of the incidence of visible underemployment in Trinidad and Tobago. Visible underemployment consists of workers who work less than the normal duration of working hours but are willing and available to work more. We find that compared to other groups of...

Measures of occupation distance based on underlying skill portfolios are constructed and used to contrast involuntary and total mobility. One component of total occupational mobility is voluntary mobility, including moves to higher job offers using the same skills, as well as promotions that may...

This paper discusses the relationship between education and crime from an economic perspective, developing a human capital-based model that sheds light on key ways in which early childhood programs and policies that encourage schooling may affect both juvenile and adult crime. The paper first...

This paper focuses on the causes of increased wage inequality in OECD countries in recent years and its decomposition into the component factors of trade surges in low wage products and technological change that has preoccupied the trade and wages literature. It argues that the length of...

This paper uses cross section data to investigate whether the returns to education vary with the level of ability. Using a measure of cognitive ability based on tests taken at ages 7 and 11 we find, unlike most of the existing literature, clear evidence that the return to schooling is lower for...

This paper provides the first firm-level econometric evidence on the skill-bias of ICT in developing countries using a unique new dataset of manufacturing firms in Brazil and India. I use detailed information on firms’ adoption of ICT and the educational composition of their workforce to...

I use within-firm, plant-level data combined with geographic information on firms’ overseas operations to examine how investment in low-wage economies affects firms’ home-country operations. To remain close to theory I focus on changes in firms’ organisational and industrial structure...

This paper exploits a quasi-experimental setting to estimate the impact that a multi-dimensional group incentive scheme had on branch performance in a large distribution firm. The scheme, which is based on the Balanced Scorecard, was implemented in all branches in one division, but not in...

This paper uses the measures of basic skills (or functional literacy) in the International Adult Literacy Survey to examine the impact of education and basic skills on earnings across a large number of countries. We show that the estimated return to formal education is sensitive to the inclusion...

Standard search models are inconsistent with the amount of frictional wage dis- persion found in U.S. data. We resolve this apparent puzzle by modeling skill development (learning by doing on the job, skill loss during unemployment) and duration dependence in unemployment benefits in a random on...