The apprenticeship system is the most important source of formal post-secondary training in Germany. Our paper contributes to the ongoing debate as to why firms are willing to invest in such training even though many apprentices will leave the training firm soon after completion of the...

This paper tests the predictive value of subjective labour supply data for adjustments in working hours over time. The idea is that if subjective labour supply data help to predict next year's working hours, such data must contain at least some information on individual labour supply...

In the empirical literature on labour supply, several static models are developed to incorporate constraints on working hours. These models do not address to what extent working hours are constrained within jobs, and to what extent working hours can be adjusted by means of changing employer. The...

The Dutch mandatory pension system consists of two parts: a public pay-as-you-go part that provides a minimum income to all Dutch inhabitants over age 64; and an occupation-specific capital-funded part that provides supplementary retirement income. The goal of this paper is to test for the effect...

A history of the New Zealand immigration experience and policy is reviewed in this paper. Data from the 1981 and 1996 New Zealand Censuses are used to illustrate changes in the characteristics of immigrants, as well as labor outcomes. The decline in the income of recent immigrants over the...

The paper studies the demand for foreign graduates at the firm level. Using a unique dataset on recruitment policies of firms in four European countries, the determinants of demand for internationally mobile high-skilled employees are established. I investigate the number, origin, skills, and...

The paper evaluates the German health care reform of 1997, using the individual number of doctor visits as outcome measure. A new econometric model, the Probit-Poisson-log-normal model with correlated errors, describes the data better than existing count data models. Moreover, it has an...

The paper provides an analysis of the recent immigration history of New Zealand and Australia. It starts with a description of the quantitative dimension of immigration: how many immigrants entered the two countries, and what was the contribution of external migration to population growth. Next,...

The paper studies the determinants of labor force participation by East German women after unification. To isolate the role of preferences on labor force participation from individual characteristics, we develop a panel data model that simultaneously explains participation, employment and wages....

As wives generally are younger than their husbands, and as they also have a higher life expectancy, wives generally have larger incentives to save for old age than their husbands. This paper analyses the household members' attitudes towards saving for old age, and the relation with the household...