Although an inverse relationship between sickness absence and unemployment has been documented in a number of studies using either quarterly or annual data from different countries with varying institutional frameworks, it is not yet clear whether this empirical regularity is due to changes in...

We investigate wage effects of deviations from peer group body mass index (BMI) to evaluate the influence of social norms on wages. Our approach allows for disentangling the influence of the social norm from any (anticipated) productivity effects associated with deviations from a clinically...

This paper investigates the efficiency of the matching process between job seekers and vacancy posting firms in West-Germany, using variation across labor market regions and across time. The results of a stochastic frontier analysis shed new light on extent and regional differences of search...

Using detailed time use data for Germany a positive correlation is found between the level of schooling education and time investments in informal education. Two hypotheses explain this observation: (1) highly educated people have higher opportunity costs of their leisure time and thus prefer...

By applying a stochastic production frontier approach to the matching process of unemployed and vacancies, this paper provides novel detailed insights into the process of job creation. For different labor markets as defined by occupation and region, the methodology produces estimates of the...

This paper investigates spatial correlation in the matching process of vacant jobs and job seekers. The importance of the interactions of regional labor markets in West Germany is highlighted in several dimensions. We test for spatial autocorrelation in regional hires, unemployment and vacancy...

This paper assesses the potential of "workplace training" with reference to German Apprenticeship. When occupational matching is important, we derive conditions under which firms provide "optimal" training packages. Since the German system broadly meets these conditions, we evaluate the...

This paper deals with empirical matching functions. The paper is innovative in several ways. First, unlike in most of the existing literature, matching functions are estimated not only on aggregate, but also on disaggregate levels which is unusual due to the scarcity of appropriate data....

This paper makes two contributions to the empirical matching literature. First, a recent study by Anderson and Burgess (2000) testing for endogenous competition among job seekers in a matching frame-work, is replicated with a richer and more accurate data set for Germany. Their results are...