A parallel of education with transformative processes in standard markets suggest that a more severe control of the quality of the output will improve the overall quality of the education. This paper shows a somehow counterintuitive result: an increase in the exam diffculty may reduce the...

The rural labour market in India is still virtually, to a large extent, dominated by the agriculture related workers, both cultivators and hired workers consisting of more than 70 percent of the rural workforce even in the current decade. However, there have been signs of a shift from farm to...

Human development, in combination with technology, yields economic growth which, in turn, is necessary to generate further advances in human development. This paper focuses on the first channel above and finds the relationship significant. Secondly, the paper tries to investigate what affects...

Skill shortages are often portrayed as a major problem for the economies of many countries including the Australian economy. Yet, there is surprisingly little evidence about their prevalence, causes and consequences. This paper attempts to improve our understanding about these issues by using...

The guide outlines the main evaluation challenges associated with ALMP’s, and shows how to obtain rigorous impact estimates using two leading evaluation approaches. The most credible and straightforward evaluation method is a randomized design, in which a group of potential participants is...

Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test...

This article critically examines the theoretical arguments that underlie the literature linking personality traits to economic outcomes and provides empirical evidence indicating that labour market outcomes influence personality outcomes. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we...

A meta-analysis is used to study the average wage effects of on-the-job training. This study shows that the average reported wage effect of on-the-job training, corrected for publication bias, is 2.6 per cent per course. The analyses reveal a substantial heterogeneity between training courses,...

We compare reported job satisfaction with vignette evaluations of hypothetical jobs by using a British, Greek and Dutch data set, containing 95 randomly assigned vignettes. In order to test comparability of international data sets recently the method of anchoring vignettes has been introduced by...

This paper applies the theory of relational contracts to a model in which a couple decides whether to marry or cohabit, how many children to have and subsequently whether to stay together or separate. We make precise the idea that cooperation in a household can be supported by self interest....