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The paper analyses which conditions may predict a better salary for people who got a PhD in social sciences and humanities (SS&H) in 13 European countries. Among the controlling variables, predictors are also: change of country of residence; percentage of time spent respectively in research and managerial activities; and impacts achieved during one's PhD programme. Findings, but also policy implications both for PhD programme planners and PhD candidates, are: some specific impacts such as having advised policy-makers, having released interviews to media and having managed and coordinated projects, all predict better salaries for PhD holders in SS&H, other things being equal. To move geographically out of one's country where PhD was awarded is also a good predictor of better wages, provided PhD holders do not swap sectors after attainment of PhD.

In this paper an analysis is carried out whether objective tests and subjective self-assessments in international large-scale studies yield similar results when looking at cross-national differences in the effects of skills on earnings, and skills patterns across countries, fields of study and gender. The findings indicate that subjective skills measures do not correlate well with objective measures of similar constructs when looking at cross-national differences. Countrywise associations between subjective skills measures and earnings do not correlate well with those found using objective skills measures. Moreover, cross-national differences in the level of subjective skills measures do not correlate well with cross-national differences in skill levels based on objective tests. Nor do gender differences found using subjective skills measures correlate with those found using objective skills measures. This does not mean that self-assessments cannot be used, but they need to be restricted to analysing within-country differences. Within countries, self-assessments do a good job in predicting skills differences across fields of study and also in predicting the effect of skills on earnings. When comparing gender differences in skills levels within countries, however, one needs to be aware that females tend to overestimate their skills levels in typical "female" domains like literacy.

This paper empirically examines the impact of academic research on high-tech manufacturing growth of 28 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and emerging countries over the 1991-2005 period. A standard research and development (R&D) expenditure based measure is found to be too general to capture the input in high-tech research. To overcome this problem, a novel proxy for high-tech research investment--the supercomputer capacity--is proposed. Empirical evidence strongly supports this choice of variable. It is also found that academic R&D exerts a larger growth effect on high-tech output than its industry and government counterparts, but only the impact differential between academic and government R&D is statistically significant.