Demographic change in industrial countries will influence educational spending in potentially two ways. On the one hand, the decline in the number of school-age children should alleviate the financial pressure. On the other hand, the theoretical/empirical literature has established that the...

Demographic change in industrial countries will influence educational spending in potentially two ways. On the one hand, the decline in the number of school-age children should alleviate the financial pressure. On the other hand, the theoretical/empirical literature has established that the...

Demographic change in industrial countries will influence educational spending in potentially two ways. On the one hand, the decline in the number of school-age children should alleviate the financial pressure. On the other hand, the theoretical/empirical literature has established that the...

This paper presents the results of a randomized experiment analyzing the use of vouchers for adult training. In 2006, 2,400 people were issued with a training voucher which they were entitled to use in payment for a training course of their choice. User behavior was compared with a control group...

We use a unique data set about the wage distribution that Swiss students expect for themselves ex ante, deriving parametric and non-parametric measures to capture expected wage risk. These wage risk measures are unfettered by heterogeneity which handicapped the use of actual market wage...

For the first time it has been made possible to merge a German and a Swiss firm-level data set that include detailed information about costs and benefits of apprenticeship training. Previous analyses based only on aggregate data showed that the net costs of training apprentices are substantial...

Good teachers are critical for a high-quality educational system. This in turns leads to the question of who is interested in going into the teaching profession. Although research has been done on the professional careers of teachers, the issue of self-selection into teacher education has been...

Dual apprenticeship training is a market-driven form of education at the upper secondary level, taking place in firms as well as in vocational schools. So far, little is known about the impact of the business cycle on the number of apprenticeship programs offered by firms. Using panel-data of...

When information about the abilities of job seekers is difficult to obtain, statistical discrimination by employers may be an efficient strategy in the hiring and wage-setting process. In this article, we use a unique, longitudinal survey that follows the PISA 2000 students in their early...

This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation trying to explain individual time-to-degree variances with business cycle fluctuations. Assuming that students determine the optimum study length at university weighing up the cost of an additional semester against the consumption...