Academic careers in Germany have been under debate for a while. We conduct a survey among postdocs in Germany, to analyze the perceptions and attitudes of postdocs regarding their research incentives, their working conditions, and their career prospects. We conceptualize the career prospects of...

Studies on the underlying mechanisms of social mobility commonly find that half of the intergenerational earnings persistence remains unexplained. Focusing on the phenomenon of overqualification, this study examines a transmission channel that might operate beyond the mechanisms previously...

In this study, we try to connect the economic literature on human capital formation with findings from neurobiology and psychology on early childhood development and self-regulation. Our basic framework for assessing the distribution of agespecific returns to investment in skills is an...

On the basis of a theoretical model, we argue that higher aggregate unemployment affects individual returns to education. We therefore include aggregate unemployment and an interaction term between unemployment and the individual education level in a standard Mincer equation. Our results show...

Based on a sample of research units in science and engineering at German universities, this study reports survey evidence showing that research grants impact research content. Research units that receive funds from industry are more likely to source ideas from the private sector. The higher the...

This paper analyzes how high-ability students respond to different indicators of university quality when applying for a university. Are some quality dimensions of a ranking, e.g. research reputation or mentoring more important than others? I estimate a random utility model using administrative...

On Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia, editors who contribute to the same articles and exchange comments on articles' talk pages work in collaborative manner engaging in communication about their work. Thus they can be considered as peers who are likely to influence each other. In this...

Applying a differences-in-differences strategy, I study the decentralization of university admission as a natural experiment. Is the centralized or decentralized procedure better suited to match prospective students to universities? The analysis uses administrative data on all students within...

In this paper we report on new data on intangible investment at the level of 1-digit NACE industries of 10 EU countries. The data are constructed as a sectoral breakdown of the INTANInvest database, which contains measures of intangible investment at the level of the aggregate business sector....