The construction industry is important for Chinese rural to urban migrants. Over 90%of urban construction workers are rural migrants, and over a third of all rural migrantswork in construction. The construction industry is not only particularly important, butis also different from other...

The present economic crisis comes against the background of decades of policy changesthat have generally weakened the capacity of social safety nets to offer citizens withadequate resources for financial survival when labour markets fail to do so. Building on datafor 24 European Union countries,...

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health usingthe Swiss Household Panel (SHP) and cross-sectional data from the Survey on Health, Ageingand Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Methodologically, it addresses two important designproblems frequently...

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health ofworkers using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Methodologically, it addressestwo important design problems encountered frequently in the literature: (a) cross-sectionalcausality problems and (b)...

A Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) in the health-care sector is used to test the lossaversion theory that is derived from reference-dependent preferences: The absolutesubjective value of a deviation from a reference point is generally greater when the deviationrepresents a loss than when the...

Empirical studies on the earnings effects of tobacco use have found significant wage penalties attached to smoking. We produce evidence that suggests that these estimates are significantly upward biased. The bias arises from a general failure in the literature to control for the past smoking...

Increasing costs of most healthcare systems result in (major) financing problemsand thus are the focus of many empirical inquiries. Researchers have found thatmismanagement is often a consequence of misplaced incentives. This paper tries tooutline some cases in which the demand side of...

We analyze the two goals behind the European Bologna Process of increasing student mobility: enabling graduates to develop multi-cultural skills and increasing the quality of universities. We isolate three effects: 1) a competition effect that raises quality; 2) a free rider effect that lowers...

The paper confronts different aspects of decentralization: fiscal decentralization, postconstitutionalregulatory decentralization, and constitutional decentralization – using a singledataset from Russian Federation of the Yeltsin period as a politically asymmetric country anda variety of...

We analyze the rise and decline of the steel and mining industries in the regionsof Saarland, Lorraine und Luxemburg over a long period, from the mid-19th century to 2003.Our main focus in on the period of structural decline in these industries after the secondworld war. Dierences in the...