Good understanding on the human capital externalities is important for both policy makers and social science researchers. Economists have speculated for at least a century that the social returns to education may exceed the private returns. In this paper, using the longitudinal data from China...

Die Personalökonomik ist eine recht junge (Teil-)Disziplin, die (mikro-)ökonomische Methoden und Erkenntnisse auf die betriebliche Personalfunktion anwendet. Sie ist wissenschaftlich fruchtbar und ist komplementär zu anderen disziplinären Zugängen zu Personalproblemen, während ein...

Using longitudinal data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we examine how individual wages change in line with the share of college graduates in a given province. The individual fixed effect model shows that the external returns to education in China appear to be zero. We estimate an...

While high rates of youth unemployment are a severe problem in most European countries, the program evaluation literature shows that di sadvantaged youths constitute a group that is particularly difficult to assist effectively. As innovative measures are thus needed, we evaluate a German pilot...

Social surveys are often used to estimate unemployment duration distributions. Survey non-response may then cause a bias. We study this by using a data set that combines survey information of individual workers with administrative records of the same workers. The latter provide information on...

Across countries, women own significantly fewer businesses than do men. We show that this is due, in large part, to the fact that the propensity to start businesses of women is significantly lower than that of men. The lower propensity of women, in turn, appears to be highly correlated to...

This paper investigates the occupational attainment and job mobility of permanent ruralto-urban migrants and compares them with migrants who were born with an urban hukou. Using data from the 2003 China General Social Survey, we examine how much of the gaps in occupational-prestige scores...

Active labour market policies (ALMPs) may play an important role in preventing an increase in long-term unemployment following the Great Recession. We consider this issue for Denmark, a country relying extensively on this instrument. We present evidence on the effectiveness of ALMPs as a way of...

There is a general presumption that social preferences can be ignored if markets are competitive. Market experiments (Smith 1962) and recent theoretical results (Dufwenberg et al. 2008) suggest that competition forces people to behave as if they were purely self-interested. We qualify this view....

This empirical study examines how sources of reciprocity are related to work motivation by distinguishing positive and negative work attitudes in practical working environments. We move away from the unidimensional perspective of monetary compensation and investigate employees' reciprocal...