Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...

Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test...

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is not only a transfer of capital, but a complex bundle of capital and firm-specific assets like production and management know-how. In particular, the transfer of production know-how improves overall productivity of FDI-receiving firms and to some extent also...

For high wage countries, such as Austria, employment growth in foreign affiliates abroad is commonly expected to substitute for jobs at home. Estimates from bilateral data on the foreign and domestic activities of Austrian manufacturing firms over the period 1990-1996, covering the 10 most...

Using data on large and medium sized Austrian manufacturing firms this paper analyzes empirically in which way a high degree of export orientation and foreign production abroad, as two modes of serving foreign markets, are related to the growth performance of domestic production. Robust median...

The evolution of higher moments of the firm size distribution so far seems to be neglected in the empirical firm growth literature. Based on GMM estimates, this paper introduces simple Wald tests to investigate whether the firm size distribution converges in both the second and third central...

Income distribution as it currently is and its long-term development are studied from a variety of data sources. In terms of workers, the study focuses on the wages and salaries of the dependently employed. It finds that the gap between low- and high-wage earners is broad and has further widened...

Based on a structural model for initial firm size, survival and firm growth we estimate firm-specific transition probabilities between size classes of the firm size distribution. This allows an assessment of the impact of different (counterfactual) economic policy measures on intra-distribution...

This paper shows that applying simple employment-weighted OLS estimation to Davis - Haltiwanger - Schuh (1996) firm level job creation rates taking the values 2 and -2 for entering and exiting firms, respectively, provides biased and inconsistent parameter estimates. Consequently, we argue that...