In this paper we use a large official employer-employee dataset, which includes almost the whole universe of business firms, to document and decompose the rising graduates postgraduates' wage differentials in Portugal. Using a non-parametric matching exercise, we pay particular attention to...

Age heaping-based numeracy indicators have served as valuable tools to derive basic human capital estimates, especially for periods where other indicators are unavailable. However, the accuracy of individual age statements usually remains unknown, and due to the lack of precise information it...

We present the first evidence that international emigrant selection on education and earnings materializes through occupational skills. Combining novel data from a representative Mexican task survey with rich individual-level worker data, we find that Mexican migrants to the United States have...

Market-oriented reforms, such as liberalizing trade and encouraging foreign direct investment, can generate large efficiency gains for a country. However, there is also concern that lower-skilled workers are increasingly being replaced by technology and that more globalized markets are harming...

Our paper makes a first attempt to address the impact of skills and skill use in the analysis of the gender wage gap using the PIAAC dataset. Using the case of Austria, we show that skill use as well as the skill match play an important role with regard to wage regressions of men as well as...

Policymakers in many OECD countries are increasingly concerned about high and rising inequality. Much of the evidence (as far back as Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations) points to the importance of skills in tackling wage inequality. Yet a recent strand of the research argues that (cognitive)...

Using Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) data for 21 countries, I study the impact of employment protection laws (EPL) on job content. Economic theories predict that stricter protection increases workers' willingness to make firm-specific investments. These...

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 discusses the relevance of recent research on the economics of human development to the work of the Human Development and Capability Association. The recent economics of human development brings insights about the dynamics of skill accumulation to an otherwise static literature on...

This article explores the impact of innovation, offshoring and demand on profits and wage dynamics. The growing relevance of functional distribution in terms of explaining personal distribution underscores the importance of our results for understanding recent increases in inequality. The...

Using new and harmonized worker-level survey data on tasks at work in the developing world, this paper constructs, for the first time, a measure of the skill content of occupations for 10 low and middle-income countries. Following Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003), Acemoglu and Autor (2011), and...

Using the OECD-studies PIAAC and ALL, this paper shows that teachers on average have better literacy and numeracy skills than other respondents in almost all of the 15 countries in the samples. In most countries, teachers outperform others in the bottom percentiles, while in some countries they...

We investigate the relationship between job complexity and the skills development of adult workers in Europe using the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs Survey (ESJS). The results suggest that challenging workplaces, workplaces in which jobs are designed to include complex tasks, and which place...

Using a novel database of 82.5 million online job postings, we show that employer skill requirements fell as the labor market improved from 2010 to 2014. We find that a 1 percentage point reduction in the local unemployment rate is associated with a roughly 0.27 percentage point reduction in the...

We discuss the effects of low-skill offshoring on the endogenous schooling decision of workers along with the potential changes in the labor market. The analysis is performed in the context of a matching model with different possible equilibria. Our exercise suggests that the endogenous...

The purpose of this research article was to explore the influence of knowledge and skills of human resource on the performance of culinary Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Medan City, Indonesia. Using quantitative research design, data were collected from 120 culinary SMEs located in Medan...

We investigate how the rapid increase in the low-skilled labor supply induced by the inflow of 2.5 million Syrian refugees changed the tasks performed by native workers and the amount of capital used by firms in Turkey. Despite the unexpected nature of the refugee inflow, location choice of the...

The OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the jewel in the crown of its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This paper argues that the findings and policy lessons from the project to date justify the high hopes which were placed in PIAAC when detailed planning for...

Do investments in the Czech Republic lead to employment growth or employment losses in the German firms involved? To address this question, a unique database about German firms with foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Czech Republic and firms without FDI in any country has been established...

The impact of offshoring on domestic jobs is more complicated than it first appears. In the standard narrative, offshoring production is thought to harm domestic workers by providing cheap alternative sources of labor. However, while offshoring may directly displace domestic workers, the...

Technical and industrial competences are increasingly dispersed across the globe, urging young high-technology firms in Europe to increase distances in their knowledge relations. However, establishment and maintenance of such relationships tend to be hampered by many barriers following from...

Empirical evidence for the US shows that migrants increase the productivity of regions. To explain the impact of migrants on the average firm productivity we construct a general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003). We consider heterogeneous firms with different...

Massification of tertiary education, growing share of student workers on labour market and consequently increased competition for low-skilled jobs gave rise to the theory of crowding out of the less educated workers. This paper contributes to better understanding of temporary...

We use information from the new OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to investigate the link between job tasks and cognitive skill demand in 22 advanced economies. Skill demand is operationalized by the assessed literacy and numeracy skills of workers with well-matched skills to their job duties....

There is a dearth of research on the impact of technological change over employment in least developed countries (LDCs) embarking on globalization and consequent international technological transfer. Using a panel of 1,940 Ethiopian firms over the period 1996–2004 and deploying GMMSYS...

In this paper we use a large official employer-employee dataset, which includes almost the whole universe of business firms, to document and decompose the rising graduates postgraduates’ wage differentials in Portugal. Using a non-parametric matching exercise, we pay particular attention to...

Our paper makes a first attempt to address the impact of skills and skill use in the analysis of the gender wage gap using the PIAAC dataset. Using the case of Austria, we show that skill use as well as the skill match play an important role with regard to wage regressions of men as well as...

In this paper we use a large official employer-employee dataset, which includes almost the whole universe of business firms, to document and decompose the rising graduates postgraduates' wage differentials in Portugal. Using a non-parametric matching exercise, we pay particular attention to...

Broadband infrastructure enables fast access to the internet, which, evidence suggests, has significant effects on economic growth. However, labor market related issues have not received as much consideration. These include quantifying employment effects of broadband infrastructure roll-out and...

Multiple job-holding, or “moonlighting,” is an important form of atypical employment in most economies. New forms of work, driven by digitalization, may enable its future growth. However, many misconceptions exist, including the belief that multiple job-holders are low-skilled workers who...

Age heaping-based numeracy indicators have served as valuable tools to derive basic human capital estimates, especially for periods where other indicators are unavailable. However, the accuracy of individual age statements usually remains unknown, and due to the lack of precise information it...

Our paper makes a first attempt to address the impact of skills and skill use in the analysis of the gender wage gap using the PIAAC dataset. Using the case of Austria, we show that skill use as well as the skill match play an important role with regard to wage regressions of men as well as...

Digital technologies will both create new jobs and replace existing ones. To cope with increasing labor market dynamics in the digital age, workers will have to become more mobile across jobs, occupations, and industries. The relative importance of their job-specific skills will decrease while...

We present the first evidence that international emigrant selection on education and earnings materializes through occupational skills. Combining novel data from a representative Mexican task survey with rich individual-level worker data, we find that Mexican migrants to the United States have...

Recent empirical research in family economics has shown the importance of parental investments on child's human capital development, but it is still not clear whether parents respond to changes across time in their child's skills and health. Using the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children,...

A major concern with the rapid spread of technology is that it replaces some jobs, displacing workers. However, technology may raise firm productivity, generating more jobs. The paper contributes to this debate by exploiting a novel panel data set for Chilean firms in all sectors between 2007...

We test for the signalling hypothesis versus human capital theory using the Wiles test (1974) in a country which has experienced a dramatic increase in the supply of skills. For this purpose, we construct a job match index based on the usefulness of the school-provided skills and the relevance...

Between 1999 and 2006, Brazilian cities experienced strong growth in the provision of internet services, driven in part by the privatization of the telecommunications industry. A main concern of policymakers is that digital technology replaces routine, manual tasks, displacing lower-skilled...

We test for the signalling hypothesis versus human capital theory using the Wiles test (1974) in a country which has experienced a dramatic increase in the supply of skills. For this purpose, we construct a job match index based on the usefulness of the school-provided skills and the relevance...

Between 1999 and 2006, Brazilian cities experienced strong growth in the provision of internet services, driven in part by the privatization of the telecommunications industry. A main concern of policymakers is that digital technology replaces routine, manual tasks, displacing lower-skilled...

This paper advances a novel hypothesis regarding the historical roots of labor emancipation. It argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions in the industrial phase of development has been an inevitable by-product of the intensification of capital-skill complementarity in the...

The Dunning-Kruger effect states that low performers vastly overestimate their performance while high performers more accurately assess their performance. Researchers usually interpret this empirical pattern as evidence that the low skilled are vastly overconfident while the high skilled are...

Skills are widely regarded as being necessary for boosting productivity, stimulating innovation, and creating new jobs, while skill mismatches are often cited as being responsible for a lack of dynamism in the labor market. However, heavy investments in technical and vocational training programs...