A simple model of discretionary worker investment in human capital is developed in which worker productivity is affected by a firm-specific match and employers bid strategically for workers. The labor market returns a share of specific capital productivity to workers without Nash bargaining power and without recourse to long-term contracts, because efficient turnover transforms a worker’s forme...

Vocational education in high schools has frequently been stigmatized as an anachronistic, dead-end path for students. We use data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 to examine claims that students on a vocational track would benefit from a more academically rigorous education. Clearly, selection bias confounds attempts to untangle the effects of academic tracking on income ...

In this study we provide evidence on the e¤ect of alcohol consumption on occupational attainment and wages in England. To do this we use a pooled sample of employees from the Health Survey for England of 1994, 1995 and 1996. Using the technique of Instrumental Variables we ...nd positive returns to moderate levels of drinking that drop-o¤ rapidly as consumption increases. This result holds when...

This paper examines the effects of performance incentives in a federal job training program for the economically disadvantaged. A natural experiment that exogenously varies the incentives that government workers face allows me to identify incentive responses, which I find are consistent with a simple model of organizational behavior. Additionally, I show that the program’s incentive designers h...

The Impact of Alcohol Consumption on Occupational Attainment in England In this study we provide evidence on the effect of alcohol consumption on occupational attainment in England. To do this we use samples of employees from the Health Survey for England between 1992 and 1996. We find that due to the endogenous nature of alcohol consumption, OLS estimates may provide a biased picture of the im...

Using German linked employer-employee data, this paper investigates the impact of on-the-job training on wages. The applied estimation technique was fi rst introduced by Leuven and Oosterbeek (2008). The idea is to compare wages of employees who intended to participate in training but did not do so because of a random event with wages of training participants. The estimated wage returns are sta...

In Germany, the streaming of students into an academic or nonacademic track at age 10 can be revised at later educational stages. To investigate the importance of such revisions, we use administrative data on the student population in one German state to measure the persistence of a randomly allocated disadvantage in the form of the school entry age’s impact on track attainment. Based on exogen...

Resource booms can affect student achievement through greater labor demand, where rising wages pull students or teachers out of schools, and through an expanded tax base, where increased school spending alters teacher quality or student productivity. Using shale depth variation across Texas school districts with annual oil and gas price variation, this study finds that resource development slig...

Are U.S. immigrants' English proficiency and social outcomes the result of their cultural preferences, or of more fundamental constraints? Using 2000 Census microdata, we relate immigrants' English proficiency, marriage, fertility and residential location variables to their age at arrival in the U.S., and in particular whether that age fell within the "critical period" of language acquisition. ...

This paper surveys the empirical evidence on causal effects of educatio studies in the light of their underlying identifying assumptions. We work o which lead to rather different interpretations of the estimated causal effect extend causal return estimates are informative regarding educational policy Despite the substantial methodological differences, we have to conclude t and do not deviate su...