The literature on labor utilization and nonwage labor costs is extended to incorporate recent approaches to macroeconomic disequilibrium modeling based on the "smoothing by aggregation" principle. This leads to a reformulation of the basic Sneessens-Dreze type model by treating employment and...

This paper analyzes the interday stability of the price process using transaction data. While the vast majority of empirical studies on the microstructure of financial markets rests on the tacit assumption that observed prices are generated by a time-invariant price process, we question this...

This paper focuses on the role personality traits play in determining individual unemployment duration. We argue that a worker’s job search intensity is decisively driven by her personality traits, reflected in her propensity to motivate and control herself while searching for a job. Moreover,...

In this paper, human capital investments are evaluated by assuming heterogeneous returns to schooling. We use the potential outcome approach to measure the causal effect of human capital investments on earnings as a continuous treatment effect. Empirical evidence is based on a sample of West...

This paper deals with the labor market entrance of young people in the Federal Republic of Germany. The main focus is on failures during this stage. First, an overview of the youth labor market in Germany is given. Then, the transition from vocational training to work is analyzed: The duration...

A simple shrinkage method is proposed to improve the performance of weighting estimators of the average treatment effect. As the weights in these estimators can become arbitrarily large for the propensity scores close to the boundaries, three different variants of a shrinkage method for the...