The aggregate Frisch elasticity of labor supply has played a key role in business cycle analysis. This paper develops a statistical aggregation procedure which allows forworker heterogeneity in observables and unobservables and is applicable to an individual labor supply function with...

The paper provides new evidence on the outmigration of foreign-born immigrants. We make use of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and employ penalised spline smoothing in the context of a Poisson-type Generalised Additive Mixed Model (GAMM), which enables us to incorporate bivariate...

Which role do individual income prospects play in the decision to be an entrepreneur rather than an employee? In a model of occupational choice, higher expected after-tax earnings attract people to self-employment, while more risky net earnings deter risk-averse individuals. In this paper I...

Understanding the sources of individual differences beyond social and economic effects has become a research area of growing interest in psychology, sociology, and economics. A quantitative genetic research design provides the necessary tools for this type of analysis. For a state-of-the-art...

This paper addresses the question to which extent the complementarity between education and training can be attributed to differences in observable characteristics, i.e. to individual, job and firm specific characteristics. The novelty of this paper is to analyze previously unconsidered...

We investigate second generation migrants and native children at several stages in the German education system to analyze the determinants of the persistent native-migrant gap. One part of the gap can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic background and another part remains unexplained....

We analyze the effect of education on wages using German Socio-Economic Panel data and regional variation in mandatory years of schooling and the supply of schools. This allows us to estimate more than one local average treatment effect and heterogeneous effects for different groups of...

Despite numerous studies on skill development, we know little about the causal effects of music training on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This study examines how long-term music training during childhood and youth affects the development of cognitive skills, school grades, personality,...

This paper examines the question of whether risk aversion of prime-age workers is negatively correlated with human height to a statistically significant degree. A variety of estimation methods, tests and specifications yield robust results that permit one to answer this question in the...

We assess the relevance of formal education for the productivity of the self-employed and distinguish between opportunity entrepreneurs, who voluntarily pursue a business opportunity, and necessity entrepreneurs, who lack alternative employment options. We expect differences in the returns to...