Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. OLS estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and...

Individual time preference determines schooling enrollment. Moreover, smoking behavior in early ages has been shown to be highly related to time preference rates. Accordingly, we use smoking at age 16 as an instrument for schooling in order to cope with ability bias in a returns to education...

An important component of the long run cost of a war is the loss of human capital suffered by school age children who receive less education because of the war. We show that Austrian and German individuals who were ten years old during or immediately after the conflict received less education...

The economics profession has made considerable progress in understanding the increase in wage inequality in the U.S. and the UK over the past several decades, but currently lacks a consensus on why inequality did not increase, or increased much less, in (continental) Europe over the same time...

In this paper we make a systematic presentation of returns to education in Austria for the period 1981-1997. We use consistent cross-selections from the Mikrozensus and find falling returns over time. These falling returns are not caused by changes in the sample design and reduced willingness to...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. There is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and there might be an important element of selection in who obtains an apprenticeship, and what type. To...

Are the large measured wage differentials for on-the-job computer use a true return to computer skills, or do they just reflect that higher wage workers use computers on their jobs? We examine this issue with three large cross-sectional surveys from Germany. First, we confirm that the estimated...

The Global Repository of Income Dynamics (GRID) is a new open-access, cross- country database that contains a wide range of micro statistics on income inequality, dynamics, and mobility. It has four key characteristics: it is built on micro panel data drawn from administrative records; it fully...

While the volatility of job creations has been studied extensively, the survival chances of new jobs are less researched. The question when and how to expand a firm is of importance, both from the firms and from a macro perspective. Adjustment cost theories and arguments about option values of...

Job reallocation is considered to be a key characteristic of well-functioning labor markets, as more productive firms grow and less productive ones contract or close. However, despite its potential benefits for the economy, there are significant costs that are borne by displaced workers. We...