One of the most important policy goals in industrialized countries is to increase the skill level of the labor force by life-long-learning strategies. In this paper our aim is to explain to what extent the variation in training investments is determined either by (observed and unobserved)...

This paper explores inequalities in IQ and economic preferences between children from high and low socio-economic status (SES) families. We document that children from high SES families are more intelligent, patient and altruistic, as well as less risk-seeking. To understand the underlying...

We exploit a novel survey of recently arrived asylum seekers in Germany in order to estimate the degree of intergenerational mobility in education among refugees and compare it to the educational mobility of similar-aged individuals in their region of origin. The findings show that the refugees...

This paper analyzes the determinants, work-time and income effects of continuous vocational training in West-Germany on the basis of a 70% sample of the German Microcensus 1991 - a representative 1% cross-section sampIe of all German households. Several hypotheses about the influence of...

The paper analyses the theoretical and empirical relationship between employment, skill structure and innovation in East and West German manufacturing firms. The econometric part builds on firm data from the Mannheim Innovation Panel 1993, 1994 and 1995. In the German industrial sector,...

At the start of the German unification process it was a commonly held view that east German living conditions will converge to west Geman levels within a few years. This view was not only held by notoriously optimistic politicians but also by a great many of professional economists. With...

This paper analyses the extent to which gender differences in human capital contribute to explaining the observable wage differential in favour of men and its reduction since the mid-eighties among West German full-time employees in the private sector. Based on a simple analytical framework, the...