Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

We specify conditions under which a strictly positive probability of employment in a foreign country raises the level of human capital formed by optimizing workers in the home country. While some workers migrate, "taking along" more human capital than if they had migrated without factoring in...

We estimate selection and sorting effects on the evolution of the private return to schooling for college graduates during China’s reform between 1988 and 2002. We find evidence of substantial sorting gains under the traditional system, but gains have diminished and even become negative in the...

Die juengsten Erfolge von Berufsgewerkschaften sind eine Tatsache. Der Essay geht der Frage nach, ob man es hier nicht mit einem dreifachen Phaenomen der ‚verdraengten Beruflichkeit’ in der gewerkschaftlichen Organisationsgeschichte, ihrer Historiographie und der korrespondierenden...

Durch das Entstehen spezieller Berufsgewerkschaften ist in Deutschland ein neuer Gewerkschaftswettbewerb entstanden. Dieser beschraenkt sich bislang auf privatisierte, aber immer noch gesetzlich regulierte Bereiche des Verkehrs- und Gesundheitssektors. Mit Hilfe eines einfachen theoretischen...

To evaluate the prevalence in Eastern Europe of a little discussed illegitimate wage practice in which employers pay their formal employees both a declared wage and an undeclared ‘envelope wage’, an extensive survey involving 10,671 face-to-face interviews in eleven post-socialist societies...

This paper analyses the transformation of elites in the Visegrád Four countries (namely the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). Drawing on a process-tracing analysis, it argues that the emergence of foreign-led economies in the late 1990s was intertwined with political processes in...

We examine why developed societies are monogamous while rich men throughout history have typically practiced polygyny. Wealth inequality naturally produces multiple wives for rich men in a standard model of the marriage market. However, we demonstrate that higher female inequality in the...