This paper outlines the importance of labor mobility for the improvement in allocating and distributing economic resources. We are faced with an increasing lack of skilled workers and a growing tendency of unemployment amongst the low-skilled. A central political objective for the future will...

Why do people engage in entrepreneurship and commit large parts of their personal wealth to their business, despite comparably low returns and high risk? This paper connects several streams of literature to shed some light on this puzzle and suggests possible future research avenues. Key...

In Germany the foreign born population is made up of foreigners and so called ”ethnic Germans” who migrated from eastern European countries to Germany. While the first group is confronted with problems arising from the typical German concept of ethnicity and citizenship, the latter are...

Income is an important determinant of individual standards of living and participation in social life. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel shows that the level of income also affects a person's health and life expectancy. People's self-assessment of their health and health-related quality...

Immigrants are much less likely to own their homes than natives, even after controlling for a broad range of life-cycle and socio-economic characteristics and housing market conditions. This paper extends the analysis of immigrant housing tenure choice by explicitly accounting for ethnic...

This paper uses the concept of ethnic self-identification of immigrants in a twodimensional framework. It acknowledges the fact that attachments to the home and the host country are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There are three possible paths of adjustment from separation at entry, namely...

We propose a framework for comparing the relationship between poverty and personal characteristics across countries (or across years), and use it to compare levels and patterns of relative poverty in the USA, Great Britain and Germany during the 1990s. The higher aggregate poverty rates in the...

There are few studies on occupational choices in Germany, and the second generation occupational choice and mobility is even less investigated. Such research is important because occupations determine success in the labor market. In a country like Germany occupations also reflect a general...

In an open-shop model of trade union membership with heterogeneity in risk attitudes, a worker's relative risk aversion can affect the decision to join a trade union. Furthermore, a shift in risk attitudes can alter collective bargaining outcomes. Using German panel data (GSOEP) and three novel...

The Orange Revolution unveiled significant political and economic tensions between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians in Ukraine. Whether this divide was caused by purely ethnic differences or by ethnically segregated reform preferences is unknown. Analysis using unique micro data collected prior to...