We assess South African workseekers’ skills and disseminate the assessment results to explore how limited information affects firm workseeker behavior. Giving workseekers that they can credibly share with firms increases employment earnings better aligns their skills, beliefs search strategies. cannot easily has similar effects on search, but smaller earnings. only shifts interview decisions. T...

Human Capital Externalities with Monopsonistic Competition This paper provides a novel microeconomic foundation for pecuniary human capital externalities in a labor market model of monopsonistic competition. Multiple equilibria arise because of a strategic complementarity in investment decisions. JEL Classification: D43, J24

The Relevance of Post-Match LTC: Why Has the Spanish Labor Market Become as Volatile as the US One? We present a Search and Matching model with heterogeneous workers (entrants and incumbents) that replicates the stylized facts characterizing the US and the Spanish labor markets. Under this benchmark, we find the Post-Match Labor Turnover Costs (PMLTC) to be the centerpiece to explain why the Sp...

On Human Capital Formation with Exit Options: Comment and New Results Katz and Rapoport (2005) conclude that with linear production technology and the possibility of unilateral migration, region-specific shocks may increase the average level of education. Previously, Poutvaara (2000) derived a corresponding result with Cobb-Douglas technology and migration which may go in both directions. This ...

Regression and neural network models of wage determination are constructed where the explanatory variables include detailed information about skills. People skills, strategic skills, and IT skills all carry strong and significant wage premia; problemsolving skills (surprisingly) and physical skills (less surprisingly) do not. In contrast to the impact of school curriculum on subsequent earnings...

I thank Claire Black and Wei-Jang Huang for assistance in preparing this paper. I appreciate the comments of George Erickcek on a preliminary version of this paper. This paper was previously presented on November 20, 2009 at the 57th Annual Economic Outlook Conference of the Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics (RSQE) at the University of Michigan. I appreciate comments and questions for ...

We apply the comparative techniques originated by Wolpin, K.I. (1977, Education and screening, American Economic Review, 67, 949–958) and Psacharopoulos (1979, On the weak versus the strong version of the screening hypothesis, Economics Letters, 4, 181–185) to discriminate between the ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ screening hypotheses. Controlling for sample selection, we find evidence for weak but not s...

We study how search frictions in the labor market affect firms’ ability to recruit talented workers. In a field experiment Ethiopia, we show that an employer can attract more applicants by offering small monetary incentive for making job application. Estimates from structural model suggest intervention is effective because cost of application large, and positively correlated with jobseeker abil...

This paper studies the impact of immigration to United States on vote share for Republican Party using county-level data from 1990 2016. Our main contribution is show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases votes, while inflow low-skilled increases it. These effects are mainly due indirect existing citizens’ and this independent origin country race immigrants. We find political ef...

We show that business cycles reduce welfare through a decrease in the average level of employment labor market search model with learning on job and skill loss during unemployment. Empirically, unemployment job-finding rate are negatively correlated. Since new jobs product these two from transition equation, imply fewer jobs. Learning implies resulting reduces aggregate human capital. This ince...