Why do apprenticeship schemes work well in some countries, like Germany and Austria, but less so in others, like the UK? This paper argues that a necessary prerequisite for apprenticeship schemes to be successful is the enforceability of the apprenticeship contract, most notably the firm's...

We use a unique data set about the future wage distribution that Swiss students expect for themselves ex-ante, suggesting that students use very little private information about their wage prospects. Expectations appear much more anchored to perceptions of actual contemporaneous market data....

The transition from school-to-work has been a burning issue in most countries for the last decades. So far research on this topic has not been conclusive, and it is still not clear whether transition problems are just individual, linked to the type of education followed at uppersecondary level,...

When information about the true abilities of job-seekers and applicants are hard to get, statistical discrimination by employers can be an efficient strategy in the hiring and wage setting process. But statistical discrimination can induce costs, if labor relations cannot be terminated in the...

Eine große Zahl ¨okonometrischer Studien, hat die Auswirkungen zentraler Abschlusspr¨ufungen auf die Leistungen von Sch¨ulern untersucht und immer wieder einen positiven Zusammenhang gefunden. Dieser Aufsatz soll dazu beitragen, den Begriff zentrale Abschlusspr¨ufung zu konkretisieren,...

Diese Arbeit untersucht Unterschiede in den Schulleistungen zwischen Jungen und Maedchen sowie moegliche Ursachen, die sich aus Charakteristika der Eltern und institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen ergeben. Hierzu werden die Daten der Schulleistungsstudie PISA 2000 mit einer Drei-Ebenenanalyse...

In the early 90s, the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, abbr. DFG) established a new form of graduate education: the so-called Research Training Groups (RTGs). Comparable to PhD programs in the US, RTGs offer a structured course program and a framework for...

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...

In this study, I provide evidence that the educational achievement of second-generation immigrants in German-speaking Switzerland is greater than in Germany. The impact of the first-generation immigrants' destination decision on their offspring's educational achievement seems to be much more...

The two choices that students in many Western European countries must make during their educational career are the type of education (vocational vs. academic) and the subject area (the specific field of education). However, most studies on the effect of education on earnings consider only one of...