A ubiquitous feature of life in peripheral communities is that school leavers have to move away to attend further and higher education. From the point of view of an individual student and his family significant amounts have to be spent to pay for term time costs. These are at least partially...

Since Marshall (1890), it has been widely held in urban economic theory that cities ensure workers against the risk of unemployment by offering a larger pool of potential jobs. Using a large administrative panel data set on workers affected by firm closures, we examine whether positive effects...

The authors investigate on the basis of primary and secondary data the relationship between individual cognitive skills and the complexity of the particular work those individuals perform. Additionally, the relationship between skills and mobility between more or less complex jobs in an highly...

This paper uses the task-based view of technological change to study employment and wage polarization at the level of local labor markets in Germany between 1979 and 2007. In order to directly relate technological change to subsequent employment trends, we exploit variation in the regional task...

Using data the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we investigate whether the willingness to take risks which is revealed via observed choices of occupation is transmitted from parents to children. Our approach resembles the one by Dohmen et al. (2008) who investigate the same question using...

Redistributive taxation and education subsidies are common policies intended to foster education attendance of poor children. However, this paper shows that in an intergenerational framework, these policies can raise social mobility only for some investment situations but not in general. I also...

We use a large linked employer-employee data set to analyze the importance of relative wage positions in the context of individual quit decisions as an inverse measure of job satisfaction. Our main findings are: (1) Workers with higher relative wage positions within their firms are on average...