This empirical research note documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance with respect to innovative activities (outlays and employment in research and development (R&D)) for a large representative sample of...

This research note uses two German data sets – the large-scale German Socio-Economic Panel and unique data from own student questionnaires – to analyse the relationship between risk aversion and the choice for public sector employment. Main results are: (1) more risk averse individuals sort...

This paper explores the interface between personality psychology and economics. We examine the predictive power of personality and the stability of personality traits over the life cycle. We develop simple analytical frameworks for interpreting the evidence in personality psychology and suggest...

This paper introduces indicators about the division of labour to measure and interpret recent trends in the structure of employment in the Netherlands. Changes in the division of labour occur at three different levels: the level of the individual worker, the level of the industry and the spatial...

We evaluate the effects of employer-provided formal training on employee suggestions for productivity improvements and on promotions among male blue-collar workers. More than twenty years of personnel data of four entry cohorts in a German company allow us to address issues such as unobserved...

Questions about compensation structures and incentive effects of pay-for-performance components are important for firms' Human Resource Management as well as for economics in general and labor economics in particular. This paper provides scarce insider econometric evidence on the structure and...

This paper analyses changes in job opportunities of older workers in the Netherlands in the period 1996-2010. The standard human capital model predicts that, as a result of human capital obsolescence, mobility becomes more costly when workers become older. We measure and interpret how changing...

This research provides an economic model of the way people behave during an IQ test. We distinguish a technology that describes how time investment improves performance from preferences that determine how much time people invest in each question. We disentangle these two elements empirically...

This empirical paper documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany. We use unique newly...

This research documents the effects of different forms of family disruptions – measured by separation, divorce and death – on personality development of British children included in the 1970 British Cohort Study. There are statistically significant correlations between family disruptions...