We exploit the phase-out of leaded gasoline to isolate the impact of early childhood lead exposure on outcomes in adulthood. By combining administrative data on school performance, high school graduation, crime, earnings, and cognitive and non-cognitive skills with a novel measure of lead...

The banker's common law contractual duty of confidentiality to clients has been well established for over 86 years. The four qualifications to the duty of confidentiality were crafted in 1924 in Tournier's Case when crime was viewed as a local phenomenon. The question arises as to whether and...

The subject of offshoring and productivity has not yet received the attention it deserves. Here I propose a simple framework for estimating the contribution of these strategies to the growth rate of labor productivity from a time-series perspective. This framework is then used to assess the...

Welche Chancen bieten neue Produktionstechnologien im Kontext der Industrie 4.0 für Hochlohnstandorte, um gegenüber Niedriglohnstandorten wettbewerbsfähiger zu werden und unter Umständen sogar verlagerte Produktion zurückzuholen? Dies wird im vorliegenden Discussion Paper anhand einer...

Very little attention has been paid to the impact of sports participation on the labour market in the European academic literature while it has received significant recognition in the United States. We consider sports practice as a way to improve or signal non-cognitive skills endowment. And it...

Different empirical studies suggest that the structure of employment in the U.S. and Great Britain tends to polarise into "good" and "bad" jobs. We provide updated evidence that polarisation also occurred in Germany since the mid-1980s until 2008. Using representative panel data, we show that...

Zuwanderung kann vor dem Hintergrund des demografischen Wandels einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Fachkräftesicherung leisten. Neuzuwanderer stellen bereits heute ein bedeutendes Fachkräftepotenzial dar. So sind 85 Prozent der Personen, die zwischen 1999 und 2009 zugewandert sind, aber nur 66...

Infolge der anstehenden Veränderungen durch die vierte industrielle Revolution herrscht eine angeregte Diskussion über mögliche Strukturveränderungen in Wirtschafts- und Arbeitswelt. Neben den Chancen, die die Industrie 4.0 mit sich bringt, stehen vor allem potenzielle negative...

This paper presents a spatial analysis of unemployment rates in Germany. The goal of this analysis is to explain the stubbornly low labor productivity and high unemployment rates in Eastern Germany. We build a model of commuting to distinguish between worker and job characteristics as the main...

The paper concentrates on the question whether the low level of productivity in East Germany can be explained by deficits in the stock of human capital. It is shown that figures on ?formal? qualifications yield a too optimistic view on human capital endowments; in fact, the effective stock on...