It is generally agreed that the funding base for German universities is inadequate and perhaps the time has come for serious consideration of the imposition of non-trivial tuition charges. Against this background, this paper compares conventional and income contingent loans for financing tuition...

German universities are regarded as being under-financed, inefficient, and performing below average if compared to universities in other European countries and the US. Starting in the 1990s, several German federal states implemented reforms to improve this situation. An important part of these...

Policies supporting international student mobility prepare young people for the challengesof global and multicultural environments. However, disadvantaged students have lowerparticipation rates in mobility schemes, and hence benefit less from their positive impactson career progression....

We analyze potential effects of demographic change and political constellations on higher education spending. In our panel analysis of west German states (Laender) for the period 1985 to 2002 we find empirical evidence for the hypothesis of a negative relationship between demographic aging and...

We analyse the role of training in mitigating the negative impact of technical and organizational changes on the employment prospects of older workers. Using a panel of French firms in the late 1990s, we first estimate wage bill share equations for different age groups. Consistently with what is...

We explore the impact of privatization and the entry of new firms on enterprise performance in Belarus, a transition economy in which reform and market-orientated institutional development has been limited. We hypothesize that private ownership will enhance company performance, measured in a...