Human capital is known to be one of the most important predictors of a person's earnings. With regard to entrepreneurial success, founders' human capital is an important determinant of firm's employment growth as well. This paper investigates if the depreciation of a founder's academic knowledge...

Does heterogeneity in the educational backgrounds of the founders matter for firm success? Are team foundations more successful than single entrepreneurs? These questions are analysed using data on academic spinoffs in Germany. Firm success is measured by employment growth. I find that team...

Academic careers in Germany have been under debate for a while. We conduct a survey among postdocs in Germany, to analyze the perceptions and attitudes of postdocs regarding their research incentives, their working conditions, and their career prospects. We conceptualize the career prospects of...

In this study, we examine the incidence and direct consequences of job mismatch for German graduates. Beyond measuring job mismatch by the comparison of qualification obtained by employees and required for a job, we employ self-reported skill mismatch variables concerning overall skills and more...

Decisions taken at the start of one’s career have long-term consequences and one important decision graduates have to make is whether to be regionally mobile when looking for the first job. We investigate whether being regionally mobile for the first job following graduation rather than to...

The growing importance of technology relevant non-publication output of university research has come into the focus of policy-makers’ interest. A fierce debate arose on possible negative consequences of the increasing commercialization of science, as it may come along with a reduction in...

Due to their origin from universities, academic spin‐offs operate at the forefront of the technological development. Therefore, spin‐offs exhibit a skill‐biased labour demand, i.e. spin‐offs have a high demand for employees with cutting edge knowledge and technical skills. In order to...

This paper shows that earnings losses after unemployment increase with age. First, older employees start out with relatively high earnings in comparison to employees without employment interruptions several years before the non-employment spell. This earnings advantage turns into a strong...

Labour market reforms that are designed to stimulate labour supply at the lower end of the wage distribution can never be precisely restricted to affect only the target group. Spillovers to and feedback from other segments of the labour market are unavoidable and may counteract the direct...