The paper tests for the existence of human capital externalities, more precisely those stemming from higher education, using a micro-level approach: the Mincerian wage regression augmented with the average level of education in a local geographical area (city). To solve identification problems...

This paper analyzes the effect of agglomeration economies on firms' total factor productivity. We propose the use of a control function approach to overcome the econometric issue inherent to the two-stage approach commonly used in the literature. Estimations are conducted separately for four...

The study focuses on the question of whether productivity estimates are biased due to the emergence of a new input that is usually omitted: temporary agency worker (TAW). The study analyzes labor productivity and TFP by means of a structural approach using a representative dataset of German...

In this paper I assert that the entrepreneurial spirit can also exist in salaried jobs. I study the determinants of wages and the labor market success of two kinds of entrepreneurial women in Germany - self-employed and salaried businesswomen - and investigate whether ethnicity is important in...

There are concerns about the attachment of immigrants to the labor force, and the potential policy responses. This paper uses a bi-national survey on immigrant performance to investigate the sorting of individuals into full-time paid-employment and entrepreneurship and their economic success....

This paper questions the perceived wisdom that migrants are more risk-loving than the native population. We employ a new large German survey of direct individual risk measures to find that first-generation migrants have lower risk attitudes than natives, which only equalize in the second generation.

The paper investigates the role of social norms as a determinant of individual attitudes by analyzing risk proclivity reported by immigrants and natives in a unique representative German survey. We employ factor analysis to construct measures of immigrants? ethnic persistence and assimilation....

The German secondary school stream-system has three levels: minimum (Hauptschule), general (Realschule), and university-entry (Gymnasium). Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we examine determinants of school attainment of German and foreign pupils in West Germany 1984-1993 using an...

The paper investigates the role of human capital for migrants' ethnic ties towards their home and host countries. Pre-migration characteristics dominate ethnic selfidentification. Human capital acquired in the host country does not affect the attachment to the receiving country.

This paper focuses on the entrepreneurial endeavors of immigrants and natives in Germany. We pay closer attention to Turks, since they are the largest immigrant group with a strong entrepreneurial tradition, and the self-employed Turks in Germany represent about 70% of all Turkish entrepreneurs...