When information about the true abilities of job-seekers and applicants are hard to get, statistical discrimination by employers can be an efficient strategy in the hiring and wage setting process. But statistical discrimination can induce costs, if labor relations cannot be terminated in the...

In contemporary America, racial gaps in achievement are primarily due to gaps in skills. Skill gaps emerge early before children enter school. Families are major producers of those skills. Inequality in performance in school is strongly linked to inequality in family environments. Schools do...

This study investigates the determinants and motives of professionals who change career to vocational teaching. The framework for this study is the Swiss vocational education system, which requires that teachers of vocational subjects must have a prior career in that specific field. Thus, to...

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...

This study analyzes the relationship between firms' costs of hiring skilled workers and their provision of internal apprenticeship training. Our empirical analysis draws on four waves of firm surveys conducted in Germany and Switzerland that include detailed information on firms' hiring costs...

This study analyzes the relationship between firms' costs of hiring skilled workers and their provision of internal apprenticeship training. Our empirical analysis draws on four waves of firm surveys conducted in Germany and Switzerland that include detailed information on firms' hiring costs...

Despite numerous measures intended to enhance gender equality, gender-specific study and career choices remain a persistent concern for policymakers and academics globally. We contribute to the literature on gendered career choices by focusing on explicitly stated parental preferences for their...

Matched employee-employer data from the UK are used to investigate the importance of social skills, in particular team-work and communication with co-workers, as a driver of wage growth for workers with lower formal education. We find that in social skills tasks, workers enjoy greater wage...

We empirically test the hypothesis that adolescents' occupational aspirations are more gender-stereotypical if they live in regions where the societal norm towards gender equality is weaker. For our analysis, we combine rich survey data describing a sample of 1,434 Swiss adolescents in 8th grade...

Occupational choices remain strongly segregated by gender, for reasons not yet fully understood. In this paper, we use detailed information on the cognitive requirements in 130 distinct learnable occupations in the Swiss apprenticeship system to describe the broad job content in these...