The purpose of this article is to evaluate the importance of social class, migration background and command of national languages for the PISA school performance of teenagers living in European countries (France, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, and Sweden) and traditional countries of...

Violence at schools is a well-known problem in many societies. This paper assesses the degree of school violence in 11 European countries and analyzes the determinants of being a victim and its effect on student performance. The study draws on the international TIMSS 2003 and the British...

Assar Lindbeck has pointed to the problem that generous welfare state institutions may in the long-run undermine those social norms which limit the costs and incentives effects of the welfare state and thus guarantee its viability. This study is the first to assess the empirical validity of...

Children adopt unhealthy adult food patterns at the latest by the age of four. This critical food and health behaviour acquired in childhood and youth has a considerable impact on adult disease and mortality rates. Consequently, a decision to adopt healthy eating habits will have a positive...

The concept of the life styles has gained important meaning in many facets in social sciences in the course of the last century. Worked out at first on the basis of the hermeneutic tradition of the social sciences, it was backed up increasingly in the last three decades by empiric cluster...

Universities and public research organisations play a vital role not only in the generation of new technological knowledge, but also in its diffusion. We analyse four East German local networks of innovators which differ in structure and innovative performance and investigate the characteristic...

I propose two new tests of Falk and Knell's (2004)prediction that individuals'reference income increases with ability. To overcome the difficulty that the reference income is not observed in existing large data sets, I extend Falk and Knell's model to establish a link between immigrants'...

This paper explores the pre-First World War Austro-Hungarian economy as a prominent case where growing conflict between various ethnic and national groups within an empire might have contributed to the emergence of internal borders and even its eventual dissolution. To this end we adopt an...

The change of the political regime from the socialist central planning system to a market economy and pluralistic society required the reorganisation not only of agricultural production, but also of the organisations in their support. In the Czech Republic, agricultural production is...