Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 2000 to 2006 we analyze the determinants and labor market effects of educational dropout. In addition to classical variables like family background and occupation, we examine noncognitive skills and Internet use. Noncognitive skills...

This paper investigates the development of basic cognitive, motor and noncognitive abilities from infancy to adolescence. We analyse the predictive power of these abilities, initial risk conditions and home resources for children's achievement. Our data are taken from the Mannheim Study of...

In diesem Beitrag wird auf der Basis von Paneldaten für die westdeutschen Bundesländer untersucht, ob und in welchem Maße der demographische Wandel sowie die unterschiedlichen politischen Parteienkonstellationen die Hochschulausgaben auf Länderebene beeinflussen. Wir finden empirische...

This paper studies the impact of process and product innovations introduced by firms on employment growth in these firms. A simple model that relates employment growth to process innovations and to the growth of sales separately due to innovative and unchanged products is developed and estimated...

This paper investigates the impact of early noncognitive skills on social outcomes in adolescence. The child's attention span, approach, prevailing mood and distractibility in early childhood may be crucial predictors for school achievements, health risk behavior, delinquency and autonomy as...

This paper studies the relationship between wages and the degree of firm heterogeneity in a given industry under different wage setting structures. To derive testable hypotheses, we set up a theoretical model that analyses the sensitivity of wages to the variability in productivity conditions in...

Using a large linked employer-employee data set, this paper studies the extent to which employers insure workers against transitory and permanent firm-level shocks. Particular emphasis is given to the question of whether the amount of wage insurance depends on the nature of industrial relations....

This study presents a novel empirical approach to identify financing constraints for innovation based on the idea of an ideal test as suggested by Hall (2008). Firms were offered a hypothetical payment and were asked to choose between alternatives of use. If they choose additional innovation...

This paper explores the role of R&D worker mobility on innovation performance. As one main novelty, we employ churning as a measure for worker mobility. Churning depicts the number of workers which are replaced by new ones. It is a very informative indicator since a firm may be exposed to...

In this analysis, we compare the determinants of the first-level and the second-level digital divide for private internet use in Germany. Our work offers three important innovations. First, we use the exact weekly duration of internet use to explain inequalities in internet intensity, explicitly...