By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer new insights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreign risky assets, or "home bias", from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribes the "bias" to...

This paper proposes a theory on how students' social background affects school teaching and job opportunities. We study a set-up where students differ in ability and social background, and we analyse the interaction between a school and an employer. Students with disadvantaged background are...

The present study intends to investigate the labour employment and productivity problems in Romania’s agricultural sector compared to the average level in the European Union and Member States, to reveal the gaps and the envisaged trends. For Romania, narrowing these gaps is a great challenge...

This paper uses ?rm level panel data of ?rm provided training to estimate its impact on productivity and wages. To this end the strategy proposed by Ackerberg, Caves and Frazer (2006) for estimating production functions to control for the endogeneity of input factors and training is applied. The...

Using weekly data for defect rates (proportion of defective output) for all weavers in a Chinese textile firm during a 12 months (April 2003 - March 2004) period, we provide some of the first rigorous evidence on the presence and nature of peer effects in the manufacturing workplace. First, a...

A large empirical evidence shows that on-the-job training paid by firms is mainly directed towards high educated workers. In order to explain this phenomenon, we propose two simple models adopting the assumption that education has a positive influence on the efficiency with which individuals...

Many definitions of action research, especially of participatory action research, include the idea of learning as one core result of the interventions. These definitions cover the learning of all people involved, and present an interesting learning challenge for the researchers applying action...

The German apprenticeship training system is generally acknowledged to solve the youth unemployment problem prevalent in many European countries by providing on-the-job training that often leads into subsequent regular employment within the training firms. Little attention has been paid to those...

The development and the structure of the distribution of hourly wages in Eastem Germany between 1990 and 1994 are analysed on the basis of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). To this end, we first calculate standard measures of inequality and decompose the changes in the inequality of...

The development of the West German earnings distribution in the 1980's is analysed on the basis of both the German Socio-Economic Panel and micro-data from the Employment Register of the Federal Labour Office. We find that earnings inequality in Germany has increased very little in the 1980's,...