Providing equal opportunities to all members of society independent of an individual's socioeconomic background is a major objective of German policy makers. However, evidence on the access to education suggests that opportunities of children with a non-academic family background are still...

Discontinuities in the employment profile are supposed to cause wage cuts since they imply an interruption in the accumulation of human capital as well as a depreciation of the human capital stock built up in the past. In this paper, we estimate the return to effective experience, taking into...