This paper investigates the effect of financial incentives on student performance and analyzes for the first time how the incentive effect in education is moderated by students’ risk and time preferences. To examine this interaction we use a natural experiment that we combine with data from...

Companies face competitive advantages or disadvantages depending on a country’s national institutional setting. The question is whether and how companies with highly similar product markets and technologies are able to stay competitive if they are located in disadvantaged national...

This paper examines whether high quality, curriculum-based training at the workplace makes firms more innovative. Our dependent variable innovativeness is operationalized with four different measures: general innovation, product innovation, process innovation and patent applications. As...

To date, little is known about the effects of the composition of skills on academic entrepreneurship. Therefore, in this paper, following Lazears (2005) jack-of-all-trades approach, we study how his or her composition of skills affects a scientists intention of becoming an entrepreneur....

A series of seminal theoretical papers argues that poaching of employees may hamper company-sponsored general training. However, the extent of poaching, its determinants and consequences, remains an open empirical question. We provide a novel empirical identification strategy for poaching and...

This paper investigates how training firms retain their apprenticeship graduates if they are embedded in labor markets without the frictions that the new training literature considers to be essential for investments in general human capital. We hypothesize that performance pay schemes are an...

This paper studies how an individual's composition of human and social capital affects his or her disposition to become an entrepreneur. Our theoretical analysis is an extension of Lazear's (2005) jack-of-all-trades theory in combination with the idea of bricolage of experiences and their...

We analyse how the age structure of a company’s workforce affects company performance using a linked employer employee panel dataset. With demographic changes at hand, this is of utmost importance for firms and organisations. Focussing on the organizational, not the individual level, we...

Drawing on an unusually large set of employer-employee data, we examine how workers’ pay is related to the educational composition within their occupational group. We find that educational composition as measured by the educational diversity and the educational level of an occupational group...

Although trainee pay is central to the economics of work-based training, institutionalists have paid it little attention, while economists typically assume that it is set by market clearing. We document large differences in the pay of metalworking apprentices in three countries: relative to the...