David is a Professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and a Research Fellow of the IFS. His research interests centre around determinants of the wage and employment structure. In his recent work, this has entailed bridging between macro labour (worrying about general equilibrium effects) and micro labour identification issues.
The proportion of UK people with university degrees tripled between 1993 and 2015. However, over the same period the time trend in the college wage premium has been extraordinarily flat. We show that these patterns cannot be explained by composition changes.
The UK higher education sector has expanded remarkably over the past three decades. In 1993, 13% of 25- to 29-year-olds had first degrees or higher degrees. By 2015, this had roughly tripled to 41%. Naturally, one may wonder whether the big expansion has reduced the economic returns to having a first degree. We have all heard stories about graduate unemployment and graduates employed in low-wage jobs. But what do the data show and what can we learn from history?
This paper argues that most standard theories of justice place a large weight on self and social respect and that such respect has a lot to do with the position a person holds in the productive process - their wage and employment outcomes.
We examine the wages of low skilled Canadian workers over the last quarter century and argue that they fit with an implicit contracting model with re-negotiation.
We study the impact of socio-economic status on dropping-out of high school, finding that, together, child ability measured at age 15 and parental valuation of education fully explain differences in drop-out rates between high and low parental education families.
Why have some countries done so much better than others over the recent past? In order to shed new light on this issue, this paper provides a decomposition of the change in the distribution of output-per-worker across countries over the period 1960-98
Considering immigrant earnings in the context of post-arrival human capital investment implies: cohort quality should be defined in terms of the present value of the whole earnings profile; and, an appropriate definition of macro effects is obtained using the earnings profile of the native
