We use data on international chess tournaments to study the relationship between age and mental productivity in a brain-intensive profession. We show that less talented players tend to leave the game in the earliest phases of their career. When the effects of age on productivity vary with...

Due to pension reforms, minimum retirement age increased substantially in Italy between the second part of the 1990s and the early 2000s. We compare the training participation of pre- and post-reform cohorts of private sector employees and estimate that adding one year to minimum retirement age...

The reduction of early school leaving to less than 10 percent of the relevant population by 2020 is a headline target in the Europe 2020 strategy and one of the five benchmarks of the strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training. Designing adequate policies to combat...

While it is well known that birth order affects educational attainment, less is known about its effects on earnings. Using data from eleven European countries for males born between 1935 and 1956, we show that firstborns enjoy on average a 13.7 percent premium over laterborns in their wage at...

We investigate whether tests taken during a high stakes grade by German primary and secondary students produce higher math scores than in lower stakes grades. We identify a high stakes grade with the final grade of primary or secondary school, because good performance in that grade can affect...

Labour markets are currently in a phase of cyclical recovery and undergoing structural transformation due to globalisation, demographic trends, advancing digital technologies and automation and changes in labour market institutions. Against this background, businesses increasingly report that...

Using the European Community Household Panel, we investigate gender differences in training participation over the period 1994-1999. We focus on ?lifelong learning?, fixed-term contracts, part-time versus full-time work, public/private sector affiliation, educational attainment, and the...

We use a quantile regression framework to investigate the degree to which work-related training affects the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. Human capital theory suggests that the percentage returns to training investments will be the same across the conditional...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the density of local economic activity – measured as the number of employees per squared kilometer – positively affects local average productivity. In this paper we use British data from the European Community Household Panel to ask whether local...

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey from 1991 to 1996, the authors investigate the impact of union coverage on work-related training and how the union-training link affects wages and wage growth for a sample of full-time men. Relative to uncovered workers, union-covered men are...