This paper analyzes how apprenticeship training, i.e., work-based secondary education, affects personality traits compared to full-time school-based vocational or general education. Employing an instrumental variable approach that exploits the regional differences in the relative weight of...

Private tutoring has become popular all over the world. However, the evidence on the effect of private tutoring is inconclusive, therefore, this paper attempts to improve the existing literature by using nonparametric bounds methods to find out if private tutoring yields any substantial returns...

Private tutoring has become popular throughout the world. However, evidence for the effect of private tutoring on students' academic outcome is inconclusive; therefore, this paper presents an alternative framework: a nonparametric bounds method. The present examination uses, for the first time, a...

This study investigates the determinants and motives of professionals who change career to vocational teaching. The framework for this study is the Swiss vocational education system, which requires that teachers of vocational subjects must have a prior career in that specific field. Thus, to...

Eine interessante Eigenschaft des schweizerischen Berufsbildungssystems ist es, dass es erst nach einer Karriere im erlernten Beruf möglich ist, Lehrperson für berufskundliche Fächer an einer Berufsfachschule zu werden. Es handelt sich also bei allen Berufsfachlehrpersonen um...

This paper analyses the relationship between competitive environment and R&D cooperation with universities and competitors. Our simple model suggests that cooperation creates benefits in terms of synergies but also induces costs due to spillovers. Since the value of these synergies and...

The standard economy-wide indices of labour quality (or human capital) largely ignore the role of unobservable worker characteristics. In this article, we develop a methodology for identifying the contributions of both observable and unobservable worker characteristics in the presence of the...

This paper uses a panel data set of microfinance institutions (MFI) across the world to compare several identification strategies of cost efficiency and economies of scale. Concretely, we contrast the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and...

This paper analyses the differences between national and international innovation cooperation in five European countries: Belgium, Germany, Norway, Portugal and Switzerland. We find that absorptive capacity, incoming spillovers, appropriability and risk-sharing are more important in an...

Analysing a comprehensive panel dataset of economists working at Austrian, German, and Swiss universities, we investigate how the local environment influences a scientist’s research productivity. The research environment varies if a scientist joins another department or if the characteristics...