This paper examines whether men's and women's noncognitive skills influence their occupational attainment and, if so, whether this contributes to the disparity in their relative wages. We find that noncognitive skills have a substantial effect on the probability of employment in many, though not...

Using matched employer-employee data from eleven African countries, we investigate if there is job sorting in African labor markets. We find that much of the wage gap correlated with education is driven by selection across occupations and firms. This is consistent with educated workers being...

We study the evolution of sectoral employment and labour cost in 11 European countries over the last two decades. Our statistical approach consists of decompositions for country, industry and temporal effects. Virtual economies are constructed by filtering country effects. We find that sectoral...

In this Paper we extend the standard human capital earnings function to include dispersion in the rate of return to schooling by treating the return as a random coefficient. One motivation is that if dipping further into the ability distribution has brought about the increase in supply of...

This Paper provides microfoundations for wage compression by modelling wage-setting in a world of heterogeneous workers and firms. Workers are differentiated by observable innate ability. A high-ability worker confers on a firm an externality, since their ability raises the average level of...

Lucas' 1988 model of the external effects of human capital formation is used as a starting point for an analysis of the impact of human capital on wages. Most empirical tests of new growth theory are based on time-series and cross-section data. This paper suggests a microeconometric approach to...

This Paper focuses on the entrepreneurial endeavors of immigrants and natives in Germany. We pay closer attention to Turks, since they are the largest immigrant group with a strong entrepreneurial tradition; self-employed Turks in Germany represent about 70% of all Turkish entrepreneurs in the...

This paper explores the optimal design of subsidies for hiring unemployed workers (‘employment vouchers’ for short) in the context of a simple macroeconomic model of the labour market. Focusing on the short-term and long-term effects of the vouchers on employment and unemployment, the...

The paper explores the employment implications of allowing people the opportunity of using a portion of their incapacity benefits to provide employment vouchers for employers that hire them. The analysis indicates that introducing this policy could increase employment, raise the incomes of...