John T. Addison

Skill Mismatches

In a recent paper, jointly written with Liwen Chen and Orgul Ozturk, John T. Addison has examined mismatch or the discrepancy between the portfolio of skills required by an occupation and the array of abilities possessed by the worker for learning those skills, using data from the US National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, ASVAB scores and the O*NET data base. The study focuses on cohort differences, gender differences, differences across different skills, the effects of life events such as children, the role of flexibility in occupations, as well as the effect of match quality on earnings and how much of the wage gap by gender is attributable to career match quality.

Mr Addison’s research interests include the impact of collective bargaining and worker representation, high dimensional fixed effects models of wage variation, minimum wages, strikes, and gender and pay.

While at CESifo, Mr Addison will be working on the project “Perceptions of Employee Representation at the European Workplace”. Its themes are: 1) What is the extent of formal worker representation, including its resource base and manner of communication? 2) Are worker representatives, and workers more generally, satisfied with the extent of this representation? 3) What are the determinants of these perceptions?

John Addison has published widely in journals, including the Journal of Business, Review of Economics & Statistics, American Economic Review, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Labor Economics, Economic Journal, Labour Economics, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, and Industrial Relations. He is the author/editor of a number of labour economics books, including The Economic Analysis of Unions: New Approaches and Evidence (with Barry T. Hirsch), the International Handbook of Trade Unions (edited with Claus Schnabel), and, most recently, The Economics of Codetermination: Lessons from the German Experience. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Labor Research, the Journal of International Economics and Economic Policy, and of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Labor Market Research and Open Economics.

John T. Addison is Research Professor in Economics and Hugh C. Lane Professor of Economic Theory Emeritus at the University of South Carolina and Chair in Economics at the University of Durham. He is a research fellow at the Center for Labor and Employment Law at New York University, the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg, the Rimini Center for Economic Analysis, and IZA Bonn. He obtained his PhD at the London School of Economics.