This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

This microeconometric study analyzes the effects of individual leisure sports participation on long-term labour market variables, on socio-demographic as well as on health and subjective well-being indicators for West Germany based on individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study...

The paper examines the implications of an important aspect of the ongoing reorganization of work – the move from occupational specialization towards multi-tasking – for centralized wage bargaining. The analysis shows how, on account of this reorganization, centralized bargaining becomes...

The paper examines the optimal level of training investment when trained workers are mobile, wage contracts are time-consistent, and training comprises both specific and general skills. It is shown that, in the absence of a social planner, the firm has ex-post monopsonistic power that drives...

This paper explores the implications of giving unemployed people -- particularly the long-term unemployed -- the opportunity to use part of their unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. The vouchers would depend positively on unemployment duration and...

This paper offers and tests a theory of training whereby workers do not pay for general training they receive. The crucial ingredient in our model is that the current employer has superior information about the worker’s ability relative to other firms. This informational advantage gives the...

This paper uses firm level panel data of firm provided training to estimate its impact on productivity and wages. To this end the strategy proposed by Ackerberg, Caves and Frazer (2006) for estimating production functions to control for the endogeneity of input factors and training is applied....

This paper presents new evidence on the distribution of risk attitudes in the population, using a novel set of survey questions and a representative sample of roughly 22,000 individuals living in Germany. Using a question that asks about willingness to take risks in general, on an 11-point...