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...

German Socio-Economic Panel data is used to show that the decrease in life satisfaction caused by an increase in the probability of losing work is higher when self-employed than when paid employed. Further estimations reveal that becoming unemployed reduces self-employed workers’ satisfaction...

We analyze the impact of exercising sports during childhood and adolescence on educational attainment. The theoretical framework is based on models of allocation of time and educational productivity. Using the rich information from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we apply generalized...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper analyzes the relationship between training and job satisfaction focusing in particular on gender differences. Controlling for a variety of socio-demographic, job and firm characteristics, we find a difference between males and...

High-skilled emigration has been found to affect developing economies via different channels. With a calibrated general equilibrium framework, this paper finds that the short-run impact of brain drain on resident human capital is extremely crucial, as it does not only determine the number of...

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....

We propose to model individual educational investments as a rational decision, maximizing expected utility, conditional on some characteristics observed by the student, under the combined risks affecting future wages and schooling duration. Assuming that students' attitudes toward risk can be...

What are the consequences of resource-based regional specialization, when it persists over a long period of time? While much of the literature argues that specialization is beneficial, recent work suggests it may be costly in the long run, due to economic or political reasons. I examine this...

This Paper investigates how changing the length of school year, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged, affects learning and subsequent earnings. I use variation introduced by the West German short school years in 1966-7, which exposed some students to a total of about two thirds of a year less...