Using a large representative German data set and various concepts of self-employment, thispaper tests the “jack-of-all-trades” view of entrepreneurship by Lazear (AER 2004).Consistent with its theoretical assumptions we find that self-employed individuals performmore tasks and that their...

Using two Dutch labour force surveys, employment assimilation of immigrants is examined. We observe marked differences between immigrants by source country. Non-western immigrants never reach parity with native Dutch. Even second generation immigrants never fully catch up...

Using the large-scale German Socio-Economic Panel, this note reports direct empirical evidence for significant correlations between risk aversion and labour market outcomes (full-time employment, temporary agency work, fixed-term contracts, employer change, quits, training, wages, and job...

This paper studies how portable skill accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data ontasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task-specific human capital tomeasure the transferability of skills empirically. Our results on occupational mobility andwages show that labor...

In labor markets with worker and firm heterogeneity, the matching between firms and workersmay be assortative, meaning that the most productive workers and firms team up. Weinvestigate this with longitudinal population-wide matched employer-employee data fromPortugal...

This paper identifies several distortions which create barriers to entrepreneurship. First, inaddition to the innate entry cost, there are entry costs caused by regulation. Second, unionwage policies raise the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship...<BR>

It is a widely held belief that apprenticeship training represents a net investment for training firms, the cost of which needs to be recouped after the training period. A new firm-level dataset for Switzerland reveals large variation in net costs across firms and, remarkably, negative net costs...

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...

This paper demonstrates that the share of apprentices exhibits a relatively strong seasonal pattern. This means that statistics on the share of apprentices such as those presented in official publications differ substantially from the actual yearly mean if they are measured on a date close to...

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...