Parental education, labor market experience and earnings: New wine in an old bottle?

Evidence from US data suggests that increases in parental education significantly steepen the slope of male experience-earnings profiles during early career years, other things equal.     

The Happiness of Young Australians: Empirical Evidence on the Role of Labour Market Experience

Data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth are used to investigate factors that influence young Australians' self-reported levels of 'happiness' during the school-to-work transition, focusing on the role of labour market experience. Panel logit models are fitted to control for individual effects. Fixed individual personality traits and marital status strongly influence reported happiness. There is evidence of declining well-being with duration of unemployment and of the importance of job quality, rather than just having a job. The validity of Clark and Oswald's (1994) assertion that empirical findings from happiness research show that unemployment is involuntary is questioned.     

Which workers gain upon adopting a computer?

Abstract.  Using the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey and controlling for individual and establishment fixed-effects, we find that within a year of adopting a computer, the average worker earns a 3.6% higher wage than a worker who did not use a computer. Returns are even larger for managers and professionals, highly educated workers, and those with significant prior computer experience. Employees who adopt computers for use with applications that require high cognitive skills earn the highest returns.     

Happiness in the arts—International evidence on artists’ job satisfaction

Many artists are prone to high unemployment and low incomes suggesting low job satisfaction. Our analysis including 49 countries paints a different picture. On average artists enjoy higher job satisfaction than other employees, mainly due to more autonomy.     

ARE COGNITIVE SKILLS RELEVANT IN GENDER EARNINGS DECOMPOSITIONS?

While cognitive skills are known to play an important role in labour market success, empirical evidence is mainly concentrated in its effect on returns to schooling. Evidence on the role of cognitive skills in gender earnings gap decompositions is virtually absent. I use two approaches to investigate the potential for cognitive skills to affect the size and pattern of the unexplained component of the earnings gap (‘relative discrimination’) across the wage distribution, using data from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). It has been shown that when the raw cognitive score is used to control for cognitive skills, the return to schooling cognitive skills is generally underestimated. Once a distinction is made about the origins of cognitive skills (acquired in school versus outside the school), the returns to cognitive skills can vary depending on their origin. I find that using the raw score to control for cognitive skills does not result in any significantly different estimates of the unexplained component of the gap compared to when cognitive skills are not controlled for. However, once cognitive skills by origin of skill are used in place of total cognitive skills, the results change substantially for three of the five countries examined.     

Measuring match quality using subjective data

We examine whether subjective information routinely collected in general surveys can be used to construct a single measure of underlying match quality which helps test matching models and predict labour market outcomes of workers.     

The spatial sorting and matching of skills and firms

Abstract .  In this paper we make use of a matched employer-employee database for Italy to look at the spatial distribution of wages. Using this rich database we aim to open up the black box of agglomeration economies exploiting the micro dimension of interaction among economic agents, both individuals and firms. We provide evidence that firm size and, especially, skills are sorted across space and account for a large portion of the spatial wage variation. Our data also support the assortative matching hypothesis, which we show not to be driven by co-location of good workers and firms. Finally, we point out that assortative matching is negatively related to local market size.     

Spatial disaggregation patterns and structural determinants of job flows: an empirical analysis

The paper investigates the changes in job creation and destruction flows at a very disaggregated level of analysis. We analyse whether job flows at lower levels of spatial aggregation display regularities that are in line with national ones in a bid to disentangle the role of labour market institutions. Using a unique database of the population of firms in Trentino (a north‐eastern province of Italy) from 1991 to 2001, we find that: (1) job flows show a ‘fractal’ tendency, i.e. many regularities appear to be scale invariant (magnitude of flow and persistence) and that job flow magnitude is in line with the average values for Italy; (2) there are some qualifications to their ‘fractality’: the contribution of entrant firms to the job creation process is lower than the corresponding contribution at national level, as is the share of job destruction accounted for by exiting firms; and (3) firm size and age influence job flows.