This paper investigates the relationship between personality traits and female labor force participation. While research on the role of cognitive skills for individual labor market success has a long tradition in economics, comparatively little is known about the channels through which...

A simple shrinkage method is proposed to improve the performance of weighting estimators of the average treatment effect. As the weights in these estimators can become arbitrarily large for the propensity scores close to the boundaries, three different variants of a shrinkage method for the...

This paper deals with the labor market entrance of young people in the Federal Republic of Germany. The main focus is on failures during this stage. First, an overview of the youth labor market in Germany is given. Then, the transition from vocational training to work is analyzed: The duration...

In this paper, human capital investments are evaluated by assuming heterogeneous returns to schooling. We use the potential outcome approach to measure the causal effect of human capital investments on earnings as a continuous treatment effect. Empirical evidence is based on a sample of West...