How important is mastering information and communication technologies (ICT) in modern labor markets? We present the first evidence on this question, drawing on unique data that provide internationally comparable information on ICT skills in 19 countries. Our identification strategy relies on the...

Politicians, the media, and the public express concern that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers, but 30 years of empirical research provide little supporting evidence to this claim. Most studies for industrialized countries have found no effect on wages, on average, and...

Many commentators have argued that "key skills" are becoming more important in modern workplaces. This paper draws on a survey that uses a methodology based on job analysis to measure skills at work, and estimates their implicit prices using a hedonic wage equation. The main new findings are...

This paper analyses the causal effects of educational mismatch on wages, individual health and job satisfaction. As educational mismatch is subject to unobserved heterogeneity in all of these fields, different identification strategies are applied to derive causal effects. In the wage...

While there is a broad literature on the general wage effect of training, little is known about the effects of different training forms and about the effects for heterogeneous training participants. This study therefore adds two aspects to the literature on earnings effects of training. First,...

This paper uses data from the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey, a new international dataset of adult workers in 28 EU countries, to decompose the wage penalty of overeducated workers. The ESJ survey allows for integration of a rich, previously unavailable, set of factors in the...

This paper develops and estimates a joint hazard-longitudinal (JHL) model of the timing of migration and labor market assimilation – two processes that have been assumed to be independent in the existing literature. The JHL model accounts for the endogenous age of entry in estimating the...

Mismatch of educational skills in the labor market is an emerging topic in the field of labor economics, partly due to its link to labor productivity. This is the first application of this question to New Zealand data. In this paper we examine the incidence of educational mismatch and its...

Integrating Roy with Becker, this paper studies occupational choice and matching in the labor market. Our model generates occupation earnings distributions which are right skewed, have firm fixed effects, and large changes in aggregate earnings inequality without significant changes in within...

Graduates from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are usually found to have higher wages and a lower risk of overqualification. However, it is unclear whether we can interpret the effect of STEM subjects on overqualification and wages in a causal way, since individuals...