This paper examines spillover effects from education at the firm level, separating the effects for different levels and types of education and allowing for a curvilinear relationship. Modeling a Cobb-Douglas production function, we show that wages of tertiary-educated workers depend positively...

We empirically investigate the joint training decisions of workers and firms. The aim of our study is to learn how various cost components affect workers’ (non-)participation in training. In particular, we separately consider monetary and non-monetary training costs, which is possible thanks...

Previous research on educational decisions has almost exclusively focused on individual decisions to start a particular education. At the same time, the decision to revise an educational choice has hardly been analyzed, unless it is the decision to drop out. However, dropping out is only one...

Apprenticeship training in Germany is generally considered to be an investment of companies into the human capital of their apprentices. This view is mainly based on the German cost benefit studies which testify training firms high net costs for their apprenticeships, but these results have not...

This paper investigates the rates of return and the risks of different types of educational paths after compulsory education. We distinguish a purely academic educational path from a purely vocational path and a mixed path with loops through both systems. To study the labor market outcome we...

This paper presents empirical evidence on premature terminations of apprenticeship contracts in Germany. Our novel approach uses human capital theory with a regional component as a clear-cut framework for the analysis. It derives testable hypotheses on individual decisions to finish an...

In the theoretical literature on why companies train apprentices three different approaches are usually distinguished: the investment, the substitution and the reputation motive. The aim of our paper is to empirically identify whether a company follows one or the other motive or even more than...

This paper studies willingness to become an entrepreneur depending on an individual’s composition of human and social capital. Our theoretical analysis is an extension of Lazear’s (2005) jack-of-all-trades theory. Our primary implication is that it is not individuals with a higher level of...

Using representative data containing information on job satisfaction and worker’s gender-specific prejudices, we investigate the relationship between stereotyping and job satisfaction. We show that women in stereotypically male jobs are significantly less satisfied with their work climate and...

A series of seminal theoretical papers argues that poaching of employees may hamper company-sponsored general training. However, the extent of poaching, its determinants and consequences, remains an open empirical question. We provide a novel empirical identification strategy for poaching and...