To counteract the financial pressure emerging in aging societies, statutory pay-as-you-go pension schemes are undergoing fundamental reforms in many Western countries. Starting with cohort 1937, Germany introduced permanent pension deductions for early retirement. This paper examines the...

This paper investigates the causal impact of displacement on health outcomes for Colombian children of different age cohorts. It uses the Colombian Demographic and Health Survey 2010, which provides both a number of health outcomes and information about displacement of households. Two different...

In this paper we propose a particular approach to measuring utility of income. To this end we develop a theoretical framework that restricts the class of admissible functional forms and distributions of the random components of the model. The theoretical approach is based on ideas and principles...

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

This paper examines the role of venture capital on a firm's innovation activities by using a data set of German technology-based firms founded between 1996 and 2005. Innovation is proxied by patent counts and an index of innovativeness which reflects the degree to which a young firm has...

This article analyzes how the perceived effectiveness of intellectual property protection and competitive pressure affect firms' innovation strategy choices, concretely, whether to abstain from innovation, to introduce products that are known in the market but new to the firm (imitation) or to...

This paper contributes to the policy-relevant question whether self-employment is a way out of (long-term) unemployment. We estimate the relationship between the entry rate into self-employment and previous (long-term) unemployment on the basis of pseudo-panel data for Germany in the period...

Amartya Sen has developed the so-called capability approach to meet the criticism that income alone may be insufficient as a measure of economic inequality. This is because knowledge about people’s income does not tell us what they are able to acquire with that income. For example, people with...

This paper investigates the relationship between personality traits and female labor force participation. While research on the role of cognitive skills for individual labor market success has a long tradition in economics, comparatively little is known about the channels through which...

Reducing institutional rigidities in product and labour markets is key to lowering unemployment. The impact of such labour and product market reforms, however, depends crucially on the country-specific regulatory framework. In this paper, we estimate the country-specific impact of changes in six...