Gegenwärtig streiten sich Schweizer Medien darüber, ob es sich bei der vielfach debattierten Schlechterstellungvon niedrig zu höher qualifizierten Arbeitskräften in der Schweiz um Realität oder Mythos handelt. Sospricht zum einen die Zeitung Der Bund (2006) von einem „steigenden Lohndruck...

The present paper examines the relationship between fixed-term employment and jobsatisfaction using individual-level data from the German Socio Economic Panel (GSOEP).According to theoretical expectations, fixed-term employment should be associated with arelative low level of job satisfaction,...

This paper examines the question, whether the growing use of new technologies anddecentralized forms of work organization affects the age structure of workforces withinfirms. The initial idea behind this relationship is that technological and organizationalchange may not only be skill-biased,...

The estimation of an ordered probit model for currency reforms trying to end 31hyperinflations and three big inflations of the 20th century shows that the introduction of anindependent central bank and the adoption of a credibly fixed exchange rate are crucial for the successof a currency...

We investigate the performance of a sample of German mutual equity funds overthe period from 1994 to 2003. Our general finding is that mutual funds, on average,hardly produce excess returns relative to their benchmark that are large enough tocover their expenses. This conclusion is drawn from a...

This paper investigates the impact of individual bank fundamental variables onstock market returns using data from a panel of 235 European banks from 1991to 2005. The sample period marks a significant transition in the European bankingsector, characterized by higher competition, lower profit...

‘Happiness Research’ has attracted a great deal of attention in the social sciences as well as inthe general public. This is reflected by a massive increase in the amount of scholarly work onpeople’s subjective well-being1 and the frequent featuring of happiness research in the media.The...

In a series of papers in the 1970s, Camilo Dagum proposed several variants ofa new model for the size distribution of personal income. This Chapter traces thegenesis of the Dagum distributions in applied economics and points out paralleldevelopments in several branches of the applied statistics...

This paper surveys selected applications of the Lorenz curve and related stochasticorders in economics and econometrics, with a bias towards problems in statisticaldistribution theory. These include characterizations of income distributions in termsof families of inequality measures, Lorenz...

This paper provides empirical evidence in favor of the hypothesis thatthe secular price increase in the 16th century is mainly caused by money supplydevelopments as the discovery of new mines in Latin America. First we reviewprice developments for several European countries over the 16th century...