We provide first evidence of the impact of over-education, among natives and immigrants, on firm-level productivity and wages. Our results show that the over-education wage premium is higher for natives than for immigrants. However, since the differential in productivity gains associated with over-education outweighs the corresponding wage premium…

All of our choices and all that sets us apart are governed by what we can do, what we want to do, and what we know. This dissertation aims to quantify two of these channels to better understand why we differ. The first two chapters focus on what we know and how it shapes societal gaps. The first chapter attacks the question of how much of the gap…

Using UK data supplied by universities, this paper confirms that women academics earn less than men, even after controlling for a range of covariates. Despite narrowing after 2004/05, the observed (unconditional) pay gap was still -0.089 in 2019/20, while the conditional pay gap was relatively unchanged remaining at around -0.050 in 2019/20. The…

This study aims at analyzing the gender gap in salaries observed in Spanish public universities. It focuses on the glass ceiling problem and quantifies its importance in the gender earnings gap. This article shows that most of the gender earnings gap observed among the faculty of the University of Murcia is due to a glass ceiling problem in…

Purpose: Hearing loss (HL) is pervasive and debilitating, and noise-induced HL is preventable by reducing environmental noise. Lack of economic analyses of HL impacts means that prevention and treatment remain a low priority for public health and environmental investment. Method: This article estimates the costs of HL on productivity by building…

The OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the jewel in the crown of its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This paper argues that the findings and policy lessons from the project to date justify the high hopes which were placed in PIAAC when detailed planning for the project began in 2003. First, it presents a brief…

Incorporating the decision of how to organize the acquisition, use, and communication of knowledge into economic models is essential to understand a wide variety of economic phenomena. We survey the literature that has used knowledge-based hierarchies to study issues such as the evolution of wage inequality, the growth and productivity of firms,…

Tatarstan has been developing several public policies in favour of the Tatar language; probably the most relevant is bilingual schooling. Given this, the present research compares the monthly wage income between those who studied before, during, and after the implementation of this educational reform. Using data from the Russia Longitudinal…

This article analyses the determinants of job satisfaction amongst Spanish academics, paying particular attention to the impact of research productivity and differences across graduation cohorts. Research productivity is a very relevant factor in explaining job satisfaction in academics in different stages of their career. Interesting differences…

Federal investments in education are crucial so that students are prepared for success in a 21st Century global society and workforce. Investing in education is crucial to ensuring the future health of the economy and country's global competitiveness. Many students are not prepared for success in 21st Century society and to fill current and future…

Increasingly, scholars in academia as well as journalists are noting vast pay discrepancies among professorial ranks. This study is an attempt to examine how gender, rank, and scholarly output influence faculty members' income from their institutions. Using equity theory as a conceptual framework, the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty…

This paper examines the effects of grades from higher education on labour market outcomes. Economic theory predicts that grades are rewarded in the labour market because employers regard them as an expression of valuable skills or a signal of other sought after attributes. Social closure, however, may give reason to expect no effects. Whether good…

Income inequality has been increasing in the United States, and "intraoccupational" processes are partly responsible (Kim and Sakamoto 2008; Mouw and Kalleberg 2010). To date, scholars have focused on suboccupational divisions, such as specialty areas, to understand why some members of an occupation earn more than others. In this article we…

Visa policies in the United States restrict job opportunities and job mobility for U.S.-trained PhDs who hold a temporary visa, a group that accounts for 40 percent of newly graduated PhDs in science and engineering. The Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 (CSPA) allowed Chinese students to be eligible for permanent residence in the United…

Academic couples make up a significant portion of the academic labor market. Unlike other dual-career households, academic couples must not only find employment in the same region, but often in the same institution. Previous work has not considered how outcomes may be different when dual career households work for the same employer. In the first…