Building on Lazear's skill weights approach, we study the effect of having more or less heterogeneity in the training curriculum on supply of and demand for apprenticeship training. Modernizations of training curricula provide us with a quasi‐experimental setting as these modernizations can be...

In this paper we document the wage structure and labor mobility in the Netherlands in theperiod 1999-2003. We explain the importance of wage-setting institutions in the Netherlandsand the main actors. The analyses are based on administrative sources allowing forcomparisons between and within...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of works councils on apprenticeship training in Germany. The German law attributes works councils substantial information and co-determination rights to training-related issues. Thus, works councils may also have an impact on the cost-benefit relation of...

In this paper we document the wage structure and labor mobility in the Netherlands in the period 1999-2003. We explain the importance of wage-setting institutions in the Netherlands and the main actors. The analyses are based on administrative sources allowing for comparisons between and within...

We relate risk attitudes and patience of young graduates from high-school, college and university, measured around the time that they start their labor market career in a large representative survey, to the riskiness and timing of earnings in the occupations they choose to work in. We find a...

This paper analyses the impact of risk attitudes on the decision to become self-employed among individuals who grew up under the communist regime in Ukraine, which banned self-employment so that individuals could not observe what it is like to be self-employed. Since the intra-family...

In this paper we study the joint decision process of changing the structure of jobs and laying off individual workers in a firm that downsizes its workforce. A hierarchical decision model is proposed and estimated using personnel data from a firm in demise comparing the characteristics of the...

Firms commonly use supervisor ratings to evaluate employees when objective performance measures are unavailable. Supervisor ratings are subjective and data containing supervisor ratings typically stem from individual firm level data sets. For both these reasons, doubts persist on how useful such...

This paper analyzes whether part-time employment is beneficial for firm productivity in the service sector. Using a unique dataset on the Dutch pharmacy sector that includes the work hours of all employees and a hard physical measure of firm productivity, we estimate a production function...

Several studies document the fact that low-educated workers participate less often in further training than high-educated workers. The economic literature suggests that there is no significant difference in employer willingness to train low-educated workers, which leaves the question of why the...