The growth rate of temporary help service employment is often considered to be a leading business cycle indicator, because the firing and hiring of temporary help workers typically lead that of permanent workers. However, few works in the literature focus on the mechanism that generates the lag...

This paper analyses the role of social capital on immigrants' labour market outcomes. We use the principal component analysis (PCA) to build an index of social networks and explore its impact on the probability of getting a job and on wage levels using the Households Income and Labour Dynamics...

In this paper, we develop and estimate a structural, dynamic model of schooling decisions using data extracted from the Canadian Youth in Transition Survey (YITS). The model incorporates forward-looking behavior and expectations about future benefits from investing in education. The results...

Gregariousness is an important aspect of human life with implications for labour market outcomes. The paper examines, to the best of our knowledge for the first time for Germany, gregariousness and social interaction at the workplace and associated wage differentials. Our empirical findings with...

We analyze the effects of personal characteristics of 4239 political candidates on their performance in local elections in Germany. Our results show that a candidate's occupation plays a decisive role. Occupational effects can be explained by (a) an occupation's public reputation and (b) public...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the cost of child care in the U.S. has increased substantially over the past few decades. This paper marshals data from a variety of sources to rigorously assess the issue. It begins by using nationally representative survey data to trace the evolution in...

In this paper we explore the effects of a labor market reform that changed the statutory minimum working age in Spain in 1980. In particular, the reform raised the statutory minimum working age from 14 to 16 years old, while the minimum age for attaining compulsory education was kept at 14 until...

We study whether the option to naturalize improves social and cultural integration of immigrants in the host country. The empirical analysis relies on two immigration reforms in Germany, a country with a traditionally weak record of immigrant integration both in terms of labor market performance...

This paper analyses differences between unemployed and employed job seekers in job finding rates and in the quality of the job found. Compared to the unemployed, employed job seekers have a smaller pool of job offers that they consider acceptable; this leads to lower job finding rates but better...

Risk-taking behavior is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use data on stock market participation of Swedish adoptees and relate this to the investment...