In this paper, we address the problem of estimating transport surplus (a.k.a. matching affinity) in high dimensional optimal transport problems. Classical optimal transport theory species the matching affinity and determines the optimal joint distribution. In contrast, we study the inverse...

This paper analyzes the impact of anticipated old age support, provided by children to parents, on intra-family transfers and education. We highlight an education motive for remittances, according to which migrants have an incentive to invest in their siblings' education via transfers to...

In this paper, we develop an allocation model of workers differentiated by their field of study to test whether international differences in the wage structure can be explained by differences in labor demand and supply in each country. The model explicitly takes into account the effects of...

Skill-biased technical change is usually interpreted in terms of the efficiency parameters of skilled and unskilled labor. This implies that the relative productivity of skilled workers changes proportionally in all tasks. In contrast, we argue that technical changes also affect the curvature of...

Using microdata for 35 countries over the period 1985-1994-2002 we find that labor market institutions traditionally associated to more compressed wage structures are associated to a higher family gap. Our results indicate that these policies reduce the price effect of having children but...

This paper presents a general equilibrium assignment model of workers to tasks with endogenous human capital formation and multidimensionality of skills. The model has 2 key features. First, skills are endogenous and multidimensional. Second, two types of assignment occur, workers self-select...

While the skill-premium has been rising sharply in the US and the UK for 20 years, the Dutch skill-premium decreased for much of that period and only started to rise in the early 90s. In this paper, we investigate whether the Dutch skill-premium will rise in the next decades. To answer this...

This paper provides new evidence on the nature of occupational differences in unemployment dynamics, which is relevant for the debate between the structural or hysteresis hypotheses. We develop a procedure that permits us to test for the presence of a structural break at unknown date. Our...

In very different fields of economics, economic inference and policy evaluation require economists to parametrize a production function that links measures of input factors to measures of output. While doing so, strong assumptions are implicitly made about microeconomic variables governing the...

This paper reviews the literature on two-sided atomeless assignment models of workers to tasks. Using simple parametric examples, the fundamental differences between the comparative advantage and the scale of operations models are illustrated. Holding the distributions of abilities and tasks and...