Standard economic theory predicts that firms will not invest in general training and will underinvest in specific training. Empirical evidence indicates, however, that firms do invest in general training of their workers and also points to no underinvestment in specific training. We propose a...

Wage differentials between skill groups are larger in the US than in most western European countries. Especially low skilled workers are relatively worse off in the US than elsewhere. A simple demand and supply explanation for this fact would be that relative net supply of low skilled workers in...

Due to a tax law implemented in 1998, Dutch employers can claim an extra tax deduction when they train employees aged 40 years or older. This causes a discontinuity in a firm's cost of training an employee. This discontinuity is exploited to identify two effects: the effect of the tax deduction...

This chapter surveys the economics literature on overeducation. The original motivation to study this topic reports that the strong increase in the number of college graduates in the early 1970s in the United States led to a decrease in the returns to college education. We argue that Duncan and...

Standard economic theory predicts that firms will not invest in general training and will underinvest in specific training. Empirical evidence, however, indicates that firms do invest in general training of their workers. Evidence from laboratory experiments points to less underinvestment in...

Breach remedies serve an important role in protecting relationship-specific investments. Theory predicts that some common remedies protect too well and induce over investment, either though complete insurance against potential separation or the possibility that breach is prevented by increasing...

This paper reports about a randomized field experiment in which first year economics and business students at the University of Amsterdam could earn financial rewards for passing all first year requirements before the start of their second academic year. Participants were assigned to a high...

This Paper reports a randomized field experiment in which first year economics and business students at the University of Amsterdam could earn financial rewards for passing all first year requirements before the start of their second academic year. Participants were assigned to a high reward...

This paper estimates peer effects originating from the ability composition of tutorial groups for undergraduate students in economics. We manipulated the composition of groups to achieve a wide range of support, and assigned students – conditional on their ability – randomly. The data...

Using a comprehensive administrative database we exploit independent quasi-experimental methods to estimate the effect of class size on student achievement in Norway. The first method is based on a maximum class size rule in the spirit Angrist and Lavy (1999). The second method exploits...