This paper estimates the labor market effects of short-cycle higher education programs in Colombia. Using a potential outcomes framework with partial monotonicity and multiple instruments, we exploit local variation in the availability of institutions specializing in short-cycle programs for identification. Access to these institutions significantly increases enrollment in short-cycle programs, primarily attracting students from the diversion margin, that is, those who would otherwise have enrolled in a bachelor's program, rather than from the expansion margin, comprising students who would not have pursued higher education otherwise. Enrollment in short-cycle programs increases formal employment among male compliers relative to their next-best alternative, while effects on wages are not statistically significant.
We study the short-term effect of low-skill immigration in a general equilibrium search and matching model. We add the price channel to the standard complementarity/substitution channel (i.e., how immigration affects the relative prices of goods, wages, and profits). An application to Italy reveals a positive contribution of immigrants to gross domestic product, public revenues, and public goods and a relatively large immigration surplus. Winners are employers and employees in the high-skill-intensive market. In the low-skill-intensive market, employers face higher aggregate profits but lower profits per employee; employees experience a wage drop, which is fully compensated by the increased provision of public goods. Whether these effects persist in the long run remains an open question.
Has a rising college earnings premium contributed to increased earnings inequality over the past 50 years? I answer this question with a model of college linked to a Ben-Porath human capital problem. The model is estimated from data on college attainment rates and life-cycle income profiles, which I document by education level. I find that lifetime earnings inequality within cohorts has risen significantly since the 1970s, but little of this is directly attributable to the college premium. Neither is higher tuition particularly important. Increasing earnings risk seems to be the main driver, with higher college return dispersion a contributing factor.
I investigate whether the growing importance of social skills contributed to the rise in the native-immigrant wage gap in the United States since the 1980s. Using the skill-biased technological change framework, I measure cities' likely technology adoption with historical routine-employment shares and show that labor markets with more routine tasks, which were more exposed to automation, saw larger native-immigrant wage gaps between 1980 and 2000. This effect is closely linked to immigrants' English proficiency and social assimilation, consistent with native workers' advantage in US-specific social skills and the rising returns to these skills as technology replaces routine labor.
Disparities in children's skills at the start of primary education raise the question whether these differences persist throughout primary school and also whether performance gaps by student characteristics change during this period. Using Dutch data, we examine skill development from first to sixth grade. Our findings indicate a strong relationship between early skill levels and those at the end of primary school. Sixth-grade disparities largely stem from initial differences. Performance gaps by socioeconomic status and sex increase across the primary school period but decrease by migration background. These findings highlight the persistence of early skill inequality during the primary school period.
