"Sociological as well as economic research is interested in the role of social net-works in staffing processes. Empirical studies usually consider them as relevant from the job seekers' point of view. But there is only little knowledge of firms' perspective on this issue. This paper contributes...

"Labour markets in most highly developed countries are marked by rising levels of skill segregation in the production process and increasing inequalities in skill-specific employment prospects. Local human capital has a likely effect on skill specific productivity levels and employment growth....

"It is well known that individuals' risk attitudes are related to behavioral outcomes such as smoking, portfolio decisions, and also educational attainment, but there is barely any evidence on whether parental attitudes affect the educational attainment of dependent children. We add to this...

"The current low participation rate of low-skilled workers in vocational re-training activities as well as the relatively high share of youth without vocational qualification are major challenges for German labour market policies. Recently implemented programs by the Federal Employment Service...

"Further education and training activities are considered to be recalled only with difficulty. Therefore non-formal and informal training activities have mostly not been collected in retrospective surveys. Within the framework of the IAB-ALWA study 'Working and Learning in a Changing World' also...

"Bringing welfare recipients into jobs is a major goal of German labour market policy since a reform of the year 2005. Direct job creation providing participants with temporary subsidized jobs mainly in the non-profit sector plays an important role for achieving this goal. There are three...

"The basic concept of multiple imputation is straightforward and easy to understand, but the application to real data imposes many implementation problems. To define useful imputation models for a dataset that consists of categorical and of continuous variables with distributions that are...

"The major research contribution of this paper is an analysis of the selection processes in active labor market programs. Using findings from existing literature and expert interviews with job placement officers we define a realistic selection process ranging from the registration of...

"As a reaction on high and persistent unemployment in Germany, the largest labour market reforms in post-war history were implemented between 2003 and 2005. We analyse the impact of the reform and its coincidence with an economic expansion on the efficiency of matching out of unemployment....

"This paper explores whether wage, employment and tenure outcomes of workers taking up a job subsidized by the German Federal Employment Agency differ by industry. The analysis utilizes administrative data and statistical matching techniques; it covers an observation period of 3.5 years. First,...