Leadership Skills and Wages American business seems to be infatuated with its workers’ “leadership” skills. Is there such a thing, and is it rewarded in labor markets? Using the Project Talent, NLS72 and High School and Beyond datasets, we show that men who occupied leadership positions in high school earn more as adults, even when cognitive skills are held constant. The pure leadership-wage ef...

Generalized Selection Bias and The Decomposition of Wage Differentials The major contribution of this paper is ending a new and flexible way to measure the effects of selection on log-wages. In this context, we offer a general approach to performing decomposition analysis when selection effects are present. We call the difference between unconditional and conditional expectations of the log-wag...

Overeducation and Skill Endowments: The Role of School Achievement and Vocational Training Quality Thurow’s job-competition model implies that overeducation is contingent upon the differing skill endowments of employees. As yet, only rudimentary evidence has been furnished to confirm this relationship. In the present paper, we test the theory in a more sophisticated manner, by means of a more d...

Is Child like Parent? Educational Attainment and Ethnic Origin The speed at which immigrants assimilate is the subject of debate. Human capital formation plays a major role in this discussion. This paper compares the educational attainment of second generation immigrants to those of natives in the same age cohort. Evidence using a large German data set suggests ethnicity does matter: the size o...

The Impact of Wage Increases on Job Satisfaction – Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Implications The impact of wage increases on job satisfaction are explored. First, it is empirically established that current job satisfaction rises with absolute wage level as well as with wage increases. Second, a basic job satisfaction function is constructed based on the empirical results, and theoretical ...

Identifying Population Groups at High Risk of Social Exclusion: Evidence from the ECHP In recent years in the public discourse of many European countries there has been a shift in emphasis from “poverty” to “social exclusion”. Broadly interpreted, “social exclusion” implies the “inability of an individual to participate in the basic political, economic and social functionings of the society in ...

Evaluating Environmental Programs: The Perspective of Modern Evaluation Research Large-scale environmental programs generally commit substantial societal resources, making the evaluation of their actual effects on the relevant outcomes imperative. As the example of the subsidization of energy-saving appliances illustrates, much of the applied environmental economics literature has yet to confro...

Institutional Effects in a Simple Model of Educational Production The paper presents a model of educational production which tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government chooses educational spending to maximi...

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Industrial Relations and the Wage Differentials between Skilled and Unskilled Blue-Collar Workers within Establishments: An Empirical Analysis with Data of Manufacturing Firms Increased wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers is a stylized fact, which can be observed in many developed countries. Among the explanations advanced for this phenomenon is the increasing globalization, a...