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Hiring inexperienced workers generates information about their abilities. If this information is public, workers obtain its benefits. If workers cannot compensate firms for hiring them, firms will hire too few inexperienced workers. I determine the effects of hiring workers and revealing more information about their abilities through a field experiment in an online marketplace. I hired 952 randomly-selected workers, giving them either detailed or coarse public evaluations. Both hiring workers and providing more detailed evaluations substantially improved workers' subsequent employment outcomes. Under plausible assumptions, the experiment's market-level benefits exceeded its cost, suggesting that some experimental workers had been inefficiently unemployed.

In this paper, I present estimates of the effect of local labor demand shocks on birth rates. To identify exogenous variation in male and female labor demand, I create indices that exploit cross-sectional variation in industry composition, changes in gender-education composition within industries, and growth in national industry employment. Consistent with economic theory, I find that improvements in men's labor market conditions are associated with increases in fertility while improvements in women's labor market conditions have smaller negative effects. I separately find that increases in unemployment rates are associated with small decreases in birth rates at the state level.

We apply an understanding of what computers do to study how computerization alters job skill demands. We argue that computer capital (1) substitutes for workers in performing cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules; and (2) complements workers in performing nonroutine problem-solving and complex communications tasks. Provided that these tasks are imperfect substitutes, our model implies measurable changes in the composition of job tasks, which we explore using representative data on task input for 1960 to 1998. We find that within industries, occupations, and education groups, computerization is associated with reduced labor input of routine manual and routine cognitive tasks and increased labor input of nonroutine cognitive tasks. Translating task shifts into education demand, the model can explain 60 percent of the estimated relative demand shift favoring college labor during 1970 to 1998. Task changes within nominally identical occupations account for almost half of this impact.

\"This article explains the different extent of economic marginalization of low-educated persons in different countries. Research on economic marginalization mainly studies the so-called displacement mechanism: the higher the high-skill supply is in relation to the high-skill demand, the higher is the risk of being unemployed for low-educated workers. In this article, we examine their economic marginalization in terms of status position. This research expands the explanation of economic marginalization of low-educated workers by scrutinizing additional causes, such as negative social selection, negative cognitive competence selection, and the increasing negative signal of being low educated (discredit). The results of the country comparison, using multilevel estimation techniques with inclusion of cross-level interactions, depict that, indeed, educational differences in socio-economic status attainment are larger in countries where the average competence of the group is low, the social composition is unfavourable, and the size of the low-educated group is relatively small. By considering these additional explanations, we are now better able to understand the economic vulnerability of low-educated people in educationally expanded countries.\" (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Querschnitt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1994 bis 1998.

This paper develops a model to analyse how skill premia differ over time and across countries, and uses this model to study the impact of international trade on wage inequality. Skill premia are determined by technology, the relative supply of skills, and trade. Technology is itself endogenous, and responds to profit incentives. An increase in the relative supply of skills, holding technology constant, reduces the skill premium. But an increase in the supply of skills over time also induces a change in technology, increasing the demand for skills. The most important result of the paper is that increased international trade induces skill-biased technical change. As a result, trade opening can cause a rise in inequality both in the U.S. and the less developed countries, and thanks to the induced skill-biased technical change, this can happen without a rise in the relative prices of skill-intensive goods in the U.S., which is the usual intervening mechanism in the standard trade models.

The article presents a new mechanism for translating labor market’s needs to the vocational education system that promotes the provision of long-term personnel requirements within the framework of the implementation of competence-based educational programs.

There is growing interest, worldwide, in the link between education systems and the production of skills that are valued in the labor market. With growth stagnating and unemployment soaring in much of the world, educators are being asked to focus more on producing skills that feed into labor productivity and support the sustainable growth of employment and incomes. This timely volume contributes important new findings on the dynamics of education systems and labor market outcomes in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). It analyzes an important recent shift in labor market trends in LAC: the first decade of the 21st century has witnessed a marked decline in the earnings premia for university and secondary education. This, in turn, is contributing to reduced income inequality across the region. The recent trend contrasts with the sharp rise in tertiary earnings premia that was observed in the 1990s and that helped to reinforce high levels of income inequality in the region at that time. The authors recommend that, having achieved very large increases in secondary and tertiary enrollment, the region should now focus on improving the quality of its education systems and the pertinence of education curricula for the needs of the labor market. At age 15, the learning achievement of the average Latin American student still lags two years behind his or her Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) contemporary. The study opens up an important agenda for future research. While the evidence presented on the trends in education earnings premia is clear, the conclusions about the causes and significance of those trends are largely based on suggestive evidence for a limited number of countries, and are not definitive because of data limitations. The findings call for further in-depth analysis of the nature of skill mismatches, to inform policies that can strengthen the region's future economic growth by enhancing the productivity and earnings potential of the workforce.

The relationship between training and firm-level employment adjustment given an unanticipated fall in product demand has been central to human capital theory. The most cataclysmic negative output shock occurred in 1929-30. At this time, easily the most important source of United Kingdom general training was the apprenticeship system. Using data collected by the Engineering Employers’ Federation (EEF), this paper examines the impact of the Great Depression on numbers of apprentices and skilled journeymen. Statistics cover eight skilled engineering occupations in 27 local labour markets over the period 1928–38. Relative employment adjustment responses of apprentices and journeymen accord well with general human capital arguments.