"Publicly sponsored vocational training programs are important measures of active labor market policies in Germany. A crucial factor for their success is that unemployed are willing to participate in further training. This paper deals with individual determinants of willingness to participate,...

"We examine the effects of endogenous offshoring on cost-efficiency, wages and unemployment in a task-assignment model with skill heterogeneity. Exact conditions for the following insights are derived. The distributional effect of offshoring (high-) low-skill-intensive tasks is similar to...

"Publically sponsored further trainings for the unemployed are an important measure of active labour market policies (ALMP) in Germany. Current discussions within this context also focus on the willingness to participate, which is an important prerequisite for the success of the programs....

"Theoretical and empirical contributions on export behavior highlight the importance of firms' productivity and their levels of economies of scale on firms' export success in 'foreign' markets. In the context of agglomeration economies, firms enjoy productivity gains when they are located close...

"Since 2005, jobless employable individuals have to be available for the labour market with various activation programmes helping them. One major programme is short-term training teaching certain skills or assisting in job search. However, little is known about the effectiveness of such a short...

"It is well known that individuals' risk attitudes are related to behavioral outcomes such as smoking, portfolio decisions, and also educational attainment, but there is barely any evidence on whether parental attitudes affect the educational attainment of dependent children. We add to this...

"Cross-sectional studies show that in West Germany women with different levels of educational attainment participate differently in the labor market. In this paper, I examine one potential underlying mechanism: the re-entry of mothers in the labor market after a period of inactivity. I argue...

"Despite ample evidence on intergenerational persistence of formal education as well as on the determinants of non-formal training, these issues have not yet been analysed jointly. The question remains whether people from low-qualified family backgrounds make up for their relatively sparse own...

"This paper addresses the 'Jack-of-all-Trades' hypothesis, which presumes that it is individuals' variety of competencies/experience that drives entrepreneurship instead of their level of productivity (Lazear, 2005). The analysis focuses on two related dimensions of this variety argument: taste...

"The empirical literature on unemployment almost exclusively focuses on the duration of distinct unemployment spells. In contrast we use a large German administrative micro data set for the time span 1975-2004 to investigate individual lifetime unemployment (defined as the total length of all...