This paper examines the role of the sociocultural background of students for choosing STEM fields in university. We combine rich survey data on university graduates in Switzerland with municipality level information from the census as well as nationwide elections and referenda to characterize a...

Although women earn approximately 50% of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) bachelor's degrees, more than 70% of scientists and engineers are men. We explore a potential determinant of this STEM gender gap using newly collected data on the career trajectories of United States Air...

Empirical investigations with enterprise level data from official statistics often use the averagewage as a proxy variable for the qualification of the workforce, mostly due to the lack ofdetailed information on the qualification of the employees. This paper uses unique newlyavailable data for...

We use spline interpolation to approximate the subjective cumulative distribution function ofan economic agent over the future realization of a continuous (possibly censored) randomvariable. The method proposed exploits information collected using a small number ofprobability questions on...

Using data on annual individual labor income from three representative panel datasets(German SOEP, British BHPS, Australian HILDA) we investigate a) the selectivity of itemnon-response (INR) and b) the impact of imputation as a prominent post-survey means tocope with this type of measurement...

This paper examines the impact of self-reported work limitation on the labour forceparticipation of the Australian working age population. Five consecutive waves of theHousehold, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey are used toinvestigate this relationship...

When students themselves enjoy large degrees of freedom in determining the duration oftheir studies, it results in a fairly large degree of interindividual variance in terms of time-todegree.This paper investigates individual time-to-degree in a model where studentsdetermine the optimum...

The internet has become an important data source for the Social Sciences because these data are available without lags, can be regarded as involuntary surveys and hence have no observer effect, can be geo-labeled, are available for countries across the globe and can be viewed in continuous time...

The evaluation of labor market policies has become an important issue in many European countries. In recent years, many of them have opened their administrative databases for evaluation studies. The advantages of administrative data are straightforward: they are accurate, contain a large number...

Earnings nonresponse in the Current Population Survey is roughly 30% in the monthly surveys and 20% in the annual March survey. Even if nonresponse is random, severe bias attaches to wage equation coefficient estimates on attributes not matched in the earnings imputation hot deck. If nonresponse...