This paper compares the Wellington (1993) and Smith and Welch (1989) decompositions of changes in labour market outcomes over time. The two examples considered are differences by gender in educational attainment and the gender wage differential. The results suggest that even though the procedure...

The role of non-cognitive skills in socio-economic behavior is a burgeoning research area in economics. Much interest is focused on the personality trait, locus of control, a measure of the extent to which individuals believe their fate is self-determined. The existing empirical literature...

The payoff to schooling among the foreign born in the US is only around one-half of the payoff for the native born. This paper examines whether this differential is related to the quality of the schooling immigrants acquired abroad. The paper uses the Over-education/ Required...