This paper investigates the implications of the Grossman-Stiglitz (1980) model on the informational efficiency of financial markets for the optimality of the allocation of talent to financial trading versus entrepreneurship. Informed traders make the financial market more informationally...

The Arab population in Israel constitutes an ethnic minority, at around 20% of the population. The economy of this minority is characterized by inferior outcomes relative to the Jewish majority by all indicators, including employment, wages, occupational status, social welfare, education, and...

This paper develops a dynamic model of schooling and occupational choices that incorporates personality traits, as measured by the "big five" traits. The model is estimated using the HILDA dataset from Australia. Personality traits are found to play an important role in explaining education and...

Youth unemployment in Ghana increases in parental wealth. This occurs because, without unemployment insurance, only workers with sufficiently high parental wealth can afford to remain unemployed, and do so to search for scarce, high-productivity jobs. I estimate a structural model of endogenous...

Poor countries have low rates of wage employment and high rates of self-employment. This paper shows that they also have high rates of unemployment relative to wage employment, and that self-employment is particularly high where the unemployment-wage employment ratio is high. I interpret high...

Parental influences, particularly parents' occupations, may influence individuals' entry into the teaching profession. Importantly, this mechanism may explain the relatively static demographic composition of the teaching force over time. We assess the role of parental influences on occupational...

Parental influences, particularly parents' occupations, may influence individuals' entry into the teaching profession. Importantly, this mechanism may explain the relatively static demographic composition of the teaching force over time. We assess the role of parental influences on occupational...

This paper studies the consequences of a curriculum reform of the last two years of high school in one of the German federal states on the share of male and female students who complete degrees in STEM subjects and who later work in STEM occupations. The reform had two important aspects: (i) it...

This paper investigates to what extent changes in the returns to occupational skill and declining occupational segregation have reduced wage inequality between men and women. As a first pass, I find that roughly 65% of the decline in the gender wage gap between 1985 and 2010 can be explained by...

This paper uses the task content model of occupations to investigate whether technology and trade have had differential effects on male and female workers in India. It describes trends in employment shares and wages for female and male workers based on whether they have routine manual, routine...

Using data from Sierra Leone, I explore the role of cognitive ability in sorting across sectors and the importance of perceptions in the employment decision-making process. Crucial to the analysis is the introduction of the aid-industry/development sector as a 'third sector', which is shown to...

We identify earnings impacts of exposure to an infant health intervention in Sweden, using individual linked administrative data to trace potential mechanisms. Leveraging quasi-random variation in eligibility, we estimate that exposure was associated with higher test scores in primary school for...

I examine how one central aspect of the family environment - sibling sex composition - affects women's gender conformity. Using Danish administrative data, I causally estimate the effect of having a second-born brother relative to a sister for first-born women. I show that women with a brother...

I examine how one central aspect of the family environment - sibling sex composition - affects women's gender conformity. Using Danish administrative data, I causally estimate the effect of having a second-born brother relative to a sister for first-born women. I show that women with a brother...

Using a representative survey combined with register data on long-term labour market outcomes, this paper examines how personality traits predict sorting into public and private sector employment among prime working-age individuals. To gain deeper insights into the dynamic dimensions of the...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has led to temporary suspensions of many occupational licensing laws, especially for health care professionals, in an effort to manage surges in health care demand. The crisis highlights more general concerns about occupational licensing laws, yet convincing empirical...

Die Analyse der Auswirkungen des technologischen Wandels auf den deutschen Arbeitsmarkt zeigt, dass sich seit Mitte der 2000er Jahre der vormals dynamische Wandel der Tätigkeitsprofile deutlich verlangsamt hat. Routinetätigkeiten sind kaum noch zurückgegangen und Nicht-Routinetätigkeiten...

This study analyzes the relationship between entrepreneurship intention and personal characteristics and skills by using the surveys we conducted in Turkey on 1465 senior university students. We use a modified version of the Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) scale and the Political Skills...

This study analyzes the relationship between entrepreneurship intention and personal characteristics and skills by using the surveys we conducted in Turkey on 1465 senior university students. We use a modified version of the Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) scale and the Political Skills...

The COVID‐19 pandemic has led to temporary suspensions of many occupational licensing laws, especially for health care professionals, in an effort to manage surges in health care demand. The crisis highlights more general concerns about occupational licensing laws, yet convincing empirical...

Using a representative survey combined with register data on long-term labour market outcomes, this paper examines how personality traits predict sorting into public and private sector employment among prime working-age individuals. To gain deeper insights into the dynamic dimensions of the...

Whether individuals choose occupations that teach general or specific skills can have important implications on how protected they are from changing conditions on the labor market. This paper looks at the impact of growing up in a region exposed to structural change caused by import competition...

I examine how one central aspect of the childhood family environment - sibling gender composition - affects women's gender conformity, measured through their choice of occupation and partner. Using Danish administrative data, I causally estimate the effect of having a second-born brother...

I examine how one central aspect of the childhood family environment - sibling gender composition - affects women's gender conformity, measured through their choice of occupation and partner. Using Danish administrative data, I causally estimate the effect of having a second-born brother...

A common finding of the migration literature is that migrants are more likely to choose self-employment upon return to their origin countries than non-migrants. This has led to the belief that return migration stimulates entrepreneurship in source countries and hence supports economic...

The Arab population in Israel constitutes an ethnic minority, at around 20% of the population. The economy of this minority is characterized by inferior outcomes relative to the Jewish majority by all indicators, including employment, wages, occupational status, social welfare, education, and...

This paper develops a dynamic model of schooling and occupational choices that incorporates personality traits, as measured by the "big five" traits. The model is estimated using the HILDA dataset from Australia. Personality traits are found to play an important role in explaining education and...

Jugendliche entwickeln ihre beruflichen Pläne und Erwartungen in Interaktion mit signifikanten Anderen in den sozialen Kontexten, in denen sie sich bewegen. Innerhalb gleicher institutioneller Gelegenheitsstrukturen sind regionale Arbeitsmärkte wichtige sozialräumliche Kontexte, die über das...

Youth unemployment in Ghana increases in parental wealth. This occurs because, without unemployment insurance, only workers with sufficiently high parental wealth can afford to remain unemployed, and do so to search for scarce, high-productivity jobs. I estimate a structural model of endogenous...

Occupational choices remain strongly segregated by gender, for reasons not yet fully understood. In this paper, we use detailed information on the cognitive requirements in 130 distinct learnable occupations in the Swiss apprenticeship system to describe the broad job content in these...

The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 led to a massive migration wave from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) to Israel. We document the persistence and transmission of the Soviet unconventional gender norms, both vertically across generations of immigrants, and horizontally through neighborhood and...

We present a semiparametric method to estimate group-level dispersion, which is particularly effective in the presence of censored data. We apply this procedure to obtain measures of occupation-specific wage dispersion using top-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment...

Using unique data on preference rankings for all high school students who apply for college in Ireland, we investigate whether, conditional on absolute achievement, within school-cohort rank in English and math affects choice of college major. We find that higher rank in math increases the...

The aim of this study is to explore and elaborate the concept of hybrid entrepreneurship, i.e., a simultaneous mix of self-employment (entrepreneurship) and salary employment. Lazear's theory of entrepreneurship is assessed in terms whether it can explain the phenomenon of being a hybrid...

Confidence in one's own abilities is often seen as an important determinant of being successful. Empirical evidence about how such beliefs about one's own abilities causally influence choices is, however, sparse. In this paper, we use a stylized laboratory experiment to investigate the causal...

I examine the extent to which the returns to college majors are influenced by selective migration and occupational choice across locations in the US. To quantify the role of selection, I develop and estimate an extended Roy model of migration, occupational choice, and earnings where, upon...

Occupational choices remain strongly segregated by gender, for reasons not yet fully understood. In this paper, we use detailed information on the cognitive requirements in 130 distinct learnable occupations in the Swiss apprenticeship system to describe the broad job content in these...

The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 led to a massive migration wave from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) to Israel. We document the persistence and transmission of the Soviet unconventional gender norms, both vertically across generations of immigrants, and horizontally through neighborhood and...