The paper proposes an empirical examination of the consequences of educational expansion and reform in four European countries in terms of school-leavers' labour market chances. The empirical analyses focus on the returns to higher education on the one side and vocational qualification as...

L'article se propose de mesurer et dinterpréter la progression des scolarités et de l'activité féminines en France et en Allemagne, pays pour lesquels les comparaisons des relations entre l'éducation et le travail ont surtout porté sur les hommes. Il met au jour, sur la base de grandes...

The paper builds on a French-German comparison on how individuals education and their social class position are related to each other. Labour force surveys from the early 1970s and 1990s are used as the empirical basis. We analyze patterns of occupational stratification by education from three...

In empirical education and labour market research, different approaches for measuring education have been pursued; they reach from number of years of schooling and educational scoring as continuous measures to typologies as ISCED and the CASMIN classification as categorical approaches. The value...

During the early post-war period, Western trade union movements grew in membership and achieved an institutionalized role in industrial relations and politics. However, during the last decades, many trade unions have seen their membership decline as they came increasingly under pressures due to...

Constitutional economists perceive a constitution as a complex exchange contract. All citizens grant rights to each other and surrender some of their own options because they hope to benefit from their fellow citizens doing the same. Like a simple exchange contract a constitution is considered...

The basis of European research policy since the mid eighties is a complex guiding policy idea. This guiding policy idea consists of two closely related claims, namely (a) that trans-border co-operation in research and development serves private profit interests and overall economic growth and...

The three most important international representatives of the Federal Republic of Germany - foreign minister Joschka Fischer, federal president Johannes Rau and federal chancellor Gerhard Schröder - have in the last few years all gone public with concepts for a European constitution. This paper...

Northern and Southern welfare states form different families of nations, and it is claimed that the families typical of each nation are profoundly different. Family structure in Northern nations is described as modern and deinstitutionalised, whereas the Southern family structure is traditional...