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Census data show that low-skill workers in the United States are increasingly employed in the provision of non-tradeable time-intensive services-such as food preparation and cleaning-that can be broadly thought as substitutes of home production activities. Consumer expenditure data show that the fraction of household spending in these services is increasing with the head's wage rate, consistent with the predictions of standard economic theory. These stylized facts suggest a "consumption story" for how the physical presence and productivity gains of skilled workers might affect the employment and earnings opportunities of unskilled workers. Using the presence of land grant institutions as an instrument for the supply of college graduates (Moretti, 2004), we find that a larger share of skilled individuals in a city workforce is associated with a larger share of unskilled workers being employed in outsourced home production activities. This finding shows that imperfect substitution in production and human capital externalities might not be the only reason why unskilled wages are higher in skilled cities. We also find that the association between wage growth at the top and wage growth at the bottom of a city wage distribution (with respect to the growth at the median) is larger in cities with a larger proportion of low-wage workers employed in outsourced home production activities in a base year. This finding suggests that the steady increase in the market returns to skill in the last three decades, together with somewhat more sluggish changes in consumption patterns, might provide a viable explanation for some of the wage compression in the lower half of the wage distribution observed in the 1990s

We study labor-market discrimination of individuals with “specific” characteristics in Italy. We conduct a field experiment in two Italian cities: Rome and Milan, by sending “fake” CVs to real ads. We find that there is a strong penalty for homosexuals, i.e., about 30 % less chance to be called back compared to a heterosexual male and even more so if they are highly skilled. On the other hand, we find no penalty for homosexual females. We also find a beauty premium for females only but this premium is much lower when the “pretty” woman is skilled

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may Carlo AltavillaEuropean Central Bank; e-mail: carlo.altavilla@ecb.europa.eu Raffaella GiacominiUniversity College London; e-mail: r.giacomini@ucl.ac.uk Giuseppe RagusaLuiss University; e-mail: gragusa@luiss.it AbstractThe dynamic behavior of the term structure of interest rates is difficult to replicate with models, and even models with a proven track record of empirical performance have underperformed since the early 2000s. On the other hand, survey expectations are accurate predictors of yields, but only for very short maturities. We argue that this is partly due to the ability of survey participants to incorporate information about the current state of the economy as well as forward-looking information such as that contained in monetary policy announcements. We show how the informational advantage of survey expectations about short yields can be exploited to improve the accuracy of yield curve forecasts given by a base model. We do so by employing a flexible projection method that anchors the model forecasts to the survey expectations in segments of the yield curve where the informational advantage exists and transmits the superior forecasting ability to all remaining yields. The method implicitly incorporates into yield curve forecasts any information that survey participants have access to, without the need to explicitly model it. We document that anchoring delivers large and significant gains in forecast accuracy for the whole yield curve, with improvements of up to 52% over the years 2000-2012 relative to the class of models that are widely adopted by financial and policy institutions for forecasting the term structure of interest rates. Non-technical summaryThe term structure of interest rates contains crucial information for both policymakers' and investors' decisions. Yet, in spite of a vast and growing literature on yield curve modelling, no single approach has emerged that can accurately describe the dynamic behaviour of yields. The two broad classes of yield curve models are no-arbitrage dynamic latent factor models and the Dynamic Nelson and Siegel (DNS) model. These models share a similar statespace structure in which the yields depend on three dynamic latent factors (level, slope, and curvature), which are extracted from the cross-section of yields. Broadly speaking, their differences lie in the restrictions they impose on the model's parameters. This paper's premise is that latent factor models ne...