This paper focuses on the entrepreneurial undertaking of immigrants and natives in Germany. We first study factors that affect the sorting of individuals into self-employment and then we investigate whether self-employment has a differential effect on the wages of individual workers and can lead...

The HIV epidemic has dramatically decreased labor supply among prime-age adults in sub-Saharan Africa. Using within-country variation in regional HIV prevalence and a synthetic panel, I find that HIV significantly increases the capital-labor ratio in urban manufacturing firms. The impact of HIV...

Social protection systems in developing countries are typically composed of a bundle of benefits, the major ones being health insurance and pensions. Benefit bundling may increase informality and decrease welfare. Indeed, if some of the benefits are valued at substantially less than their cost,...

In this paper, we focus on possible causal mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission of human capital. For this purpose, we use both an adoption and a twin design and study the effect of parents' education on their children's cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills, and health. Our...

This paper analyses the impact of the global economic crisis on unemployment and long term unemployment in the OECD. It uses simple econometric models using panel data (quarterly) and time series data. In general, we find that long term unemployment increases with the unemployment rate, there is...

It is often claimed that supervisors do not differentiate enough between high and low performing employees when evaluating performance. The purpose of this paper is to study the incentive effects of this behavior empirically. We first show in a simple model that the perceived degree of past...

We use longitudinal linked employer-employee data and find that the probability of participating in firm-sponsored classroom training diminishes rapidly for workers aged 45 years and older. Although the standard human capital investment model predicts such a decline, we also consider the...

Based on the notion that entrepreneurship is a 'local event', the literature argues that self-employed workers and entrepreneurs are 'rooted' in place. This paper tests the 'residential rootedness'-hypothesis of self-employment by examining for Germany and the UK whether the self-employed are...

This paper focuses on the effects of domestic and international remittances on children's well-being. Using data from the 1992/93 and 1997/98 Vietnam Living Standards Surveys, we investigate average school attendance and child labour in remittance recipient and non-recipient households. The...