This paper examines the determinants of the choice of the major when the length of studies is uncertain, by using a framework in which students entering post-secondary education are assumed to anticipate their future earnings. For that purpose, we use French data coming from the 1992 and 1998...

The paper addresses an often neglected question in labour market research: to which extent do outcomes aggregated on the national level disguise occupational diversity in employment conditions? In particular, how and why do occupational groups differ with regard to the incidence of non-standard...

Several studies document the fact that low-educated workers participate less often in further training than high-educated workers. The economic literature suggests that there is no significant difference in employer willingness to train low-educated workers, which leaves the question of why the...

Recent years have brought growing evidence for an increasing labour demand for high skilled and a deterioration of the labour position of less skilled employees. The two most common explanations for this finding are an increasing international trade and a skill biased technological change....

Firms frequently provide general skill training to workers at the firm's cost. Theories proposed that labor market frictions entails wage compression, larger productivity gain than wage growth to skill acquisition, and motivates a firm to offer opportunities for skill acquisition, but few...

This paper brings together the modern research on employer power and employee power by empirically examining the effects of unionization on worker earnings, employment, and inequality across differently concentrated markets. Exploiting national tax reforms to union membership dues as exogenous...

Participation in social groups ties members to local communities. Employers can capture these benefits as rents when geographically-specific club goods raise the cost of labor mobility. We measure ties to local clubs using the shares of households identifying with a minority religion, enrollment...

Suppose insiders use their market power to push up their wages, while entrants receive their reservation wages. How will employment be affected? In addressing this question, we focus on the role of on-the-job training. We show that an insider wage hike reduces recession-time employment but, in...

We analyse an equilibrium labour market with on-the-job search and experience effects (where workers learn-by-doing). The analysis yields a standard Mincer wage equation with worker fixed effects and endogenously determined firm fixed effects. It shows that learning-by-doing increases...