While Europe is certainly one of the richest and most educated areas of the world, some of the challenges faced by the old continent are staggering: low economic growth, structural difficulties in the labour market, and increasing international competition. Politicians and policymakers may...

We study the contribution of health-related behaviors to the health-education gradient by distinguishing between short-run and long-run mediating effects: while in the former only current or lagged behaviors are taken into account, in the latter we consider the entire history of behaviors. We...

Standard estimates of earnings profiles ignore the fact that, with unobserved heterogeneity, cross-section evidence need not reflect the `true' relationship between earnings and tenure. In this paper we argue that the observation of the position filled by an employee in the firm hierarchy is...

This paper studies the promotion policy of a large, hi-tech manufacturing Japanese firm. We find that the company has multiple ports of entry and hires a significant number of employees with previous job experience. In addition, cohort-peer differentiation in promotion starts much earlier than...

Expected earnings and expected returns to education are seen by labour economists as a major determinant of educational attainment. In spite of this, the empirical knowledge about expectations and their formation is scarce. In this Paper we report the results of the first systematic study of the...

In spite of their relative vicinity Scandinavian countries and Central European countries (mainly Germany) have substantially different schooling institutions. While the former group of countries delays school tracking until age 16, the latter group anticipates differentiation between age 10 and...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relative importance of deviations from competitive behaviour, both in product and in labour markets, in the determination of sectoral employment growth in Italy during the last forty years (1951-90). This is done with the help of a two-sector...