Im Jahr 2000 erwirtschafteten deutsche Unternehmen Gewinne, die nach Steuern 2,4 Prozent ihres Umsatzes erreichten. Damit lagen sie in einem 18-Länder-Vergleich an viertschlechtester Stelle. Geringere Nettoumsatzrenditen gab es nur noch in Tschechien, Italien und Polen. Eine tiefer gehende...

Disability insurance - the insurance against the loss of the ability to work - is a substantial part of social security expenditures in many countries. The benefit recipiency rates in disability insurance vary strikingly across European countries and the US. This paper investigates the extent...

This paper examines whether differences in wage rigidity across sectors can be explained by differences in workforce composition, wage-bargaining institutions, technology and competition. We rely on a large administrative matched employer-employee dataset for Belgium over the period 1990 - 2002....

In recent years the availability of new industry-level data allowed to evaluate the impact of labour market policies more consistently than previous standard cross-country studies. In this paper an industry-level panel is exploited to evaluate the impact of Employment Protection Legislation...

This paper considers the education of the labour force based on an analysis of trends in and the relationships between job polarization and skills mismatch. Both job polarization and skills mismatch have become topics of increasing interest, but relationships between the two have been relatively...

This paper discusses the diversity of mechanisms which firms can deploy to link to science and how science links are associated with their innovation performance. Using a sample of Flemish firms, we show that there exists considerable heterogeneity in the type of links to science at the firm...

Youth unemployment has been on the rise since the beginning of the crisis in 2008. Even more troublesome is the dramatic rise in the number of youth not in employment, education or training, which has led to widespread concerns about the impact on social cohesion and fears of a 'lost...

Most empirical distributional studies of well-being in developed countries rely on distributions of disposable income. From a theoretical point of view this practice is contentious since a household’s command over resources is determined not only by its spending power over commodities it can...

Current research on stress among academic university staff indicates that occupational stress is alarmingly widespread and increasing (Kinman/Jones 2004; Winefield et al. 2003; Bamps 2004; Tytherleigh et al. 2005). Therefore the work environment needs to be examined and more specifically organisational...