More than 4.4 million students enrolled in US public schools participate in English language learner programs because of linguistic barriers to learning in regular classrooms. Whether native language instruction should be used in these programs is a contentious issue. Recent studies, using...

We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries.  The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers.  It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow...

By analyzing occupational task profiles, an occupational change can be split up into two components (1) transferability of task portfolios between occupations and (2) change in the value of the occupation-employee match. Extending the task-based approach of Gathmann and Schönberg (2009) by...

This paper estimates wage losses arising due to changes in the structure of demand for occupations. The data on occupational changes made for the sake of adjustment to the changes in the demand structure come from the German reunification of 1990. Endogenous occupational changes are instrumented...

Inequality in access to education is known to be a key driver of income inequality in developing countries. Viet Nam, a transitional economy, exhibits significant segmentation in the market for skilled labor based on more remunerative employment in government and state firms. We ask whether this...

In recent decades, cheap labor has played a central role in the Chinese model, which has relied on expanded participation in world trade as a main driver of growth. At the beginning of China's economic reforms in 1978, the annual wage of a Chinese urban worker was only $1,004 in U.S. dollars....

This paper examines post-Soviet reforms on human capital development in Russia. The primitivization of economy in the first decade of reforms resulted in growing underemployment of skilled labour that drove out two streams of brain drain, viz. one, through classical emigration, and two, through...