Policies to promote marriage are controversial, and it is unclear whether they are successful. To analyze such policies, it is essential to distinguish between a marriage that is created by a marriage-promoting policy (marginal marriage) and a marriage that would have been formed even in the...

Extreme-right-wing (ERW) parties are on the rise in many countries. Moreover, there is an alarmingly high cross-country correlation between the election success of ERW parties and immigration. Motivated by this evidence, we explore one potentially important channel through which immigration may...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. OLS estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labour market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up...

Since the early seventies, hundreds of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity. Consequently, estimates for the gender wage gap have been published for the most diverse countries at different points in time. This meta-study provides a...

Previous estimates of the effect of unemployment on crime commonly omit determinants of criminal behavior that vary with the business cycle, creating correlation between unemployment rates and the residuals in aggregate crime regressions. In this paper, we employ several strategies that attempt...

This paper studies the impact of a selective extension of unemployment benefit duration on the incidence of unemployment in Austria. As the new law applies only to elderly workers in certain regions of the country after June 1988, a quasi-experimental situation is created. Unemployment entry is...

In this paper we look at the effects of immigration and trade with Eastern Europe on unemployment in Austria. Using individual data over the period 1989-92 of male blue-collar workers employed in the Austrian manufacturing sector, we decompose possible detrimental impacts in unemployment entry...

Several recent studies based on 'exogenous' sources of variation in education outcomes show Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates of returns to schooling that are substantially higher than the corresponding Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates. Card (1995a) suggests that these results can be...

This study deals with educational production in Austria and is focused on the potential impact of schoolmates on students’ academic outcomes. We used PISA 2000 data to estimate peer effects for 15 and 16 year old students. The estimations yield substantial positive effects of the peer...