This article studies the role of social capital in the occupational choice process involving whether to become self-employed or not. Although the decision to become self-employed has itself been analyzed frequently, social capital as an important explanatory variable has often been neglected. We...

According to standard human capital theory firm financed training cannot be explained if skills are of general nature. Nevertheless, investments of firms into general training can be observed and there has been a large literature to explain this puzzle, mostly referring to imperfect labor market...

Mobility and flexibility is increasingly demanded as structural change challenges established educational systems and traditional occupational demarcations. We use Lazear's skill-weights approach (2003) first to operationalize the degree of specificity of skill combinations in an innovative...

In a recent paper Lazear (2004) proposed the so called skill-weights view of firm-specific human capital. According to his theory all single skills are general but each firm may require a different combination of these single skills. The purpose of our paper is to test Lazear's model using a...