This paper provides an introduction and overview of my research on the Economics of Language. The approach is that language skills among immigrants and native-born linguistic minorities are a form of human capital. There are costs and benefits associated with this characteristic embodied in the...

This paper proposes that risk aversion encourages individuals to invest in balanced skillprofiles, making them more likely to become entrepreneurs. By not having taken this possiblelinkage into account, previous research has underestimated the impacts both of risk aversionand balanced skills on...

By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer newinsights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreignrisky assets, or “home bias”, from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribesthe...

Using the large-scale German Socio-Economic Panel, this note reports direct empirical evidence for significant correlations between risk aversion and labour market outcomes (full-time employment, temporary agency work, fixed-term contracts, employer change, quits, training, wages, and job...

Assuming a two-period model with endogenous choices of labour, education, and saving, it is shown to be second-best efficient not to distort the choice of education...

This paper examines the relationship between the brain drain and country size, as well as the extent of small states overall loss of human capital. We find that small states are the main losers because they i) lose a larger proportion of their skilled labor force and ii) exhibit stronger...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countriesfor the participants. There is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered,and there might be an important element of selection in who obtains an apprenticeship, andwhat type. To...

This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of language capital amongstimmigrants, and the effect of language deficiencies on the economic performance of secondgeneration immigrants...

This paper studies how portable skill accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data ontasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task-specific human capital tomeasure the transferability of skills empirically. Our results on occupational mobility andwages show that labor...