This is a comment on a ranking of German economics departments published by a semi-official institution, the Center for Higher Education Development (CHE). It is shown that the CHE ranking is highly misleading because the publication output is not weighted according to quality. The CHE ranking...

The current analysis introduces human capital investments which - as all other investment projects - must be carried out given ex-ante uncertain returns. This return uncertainty reflects that particular ex-post ability realizations may or may not induce the possibility to engage in profitable...

There are theoretical foundations which allow hypothesizing on a positive association of life expectancy or retirement age with income. If both cannot be falsified, the relationship of income and the internal rate of return of a public pension system is not straight forward. By application of a...

This paper introduces and discusses an idea which minimizes gaming or manipulation activities, if payments are linked to results from manipulative methods. The idea is to add nonmanipulable information to manipulable information to improve the evaluation of a given output. A score declining in...

Wage and productivity effects of training are compared to study how the training rent is shared between employers and employees. Using panel data from 1996-2002, I analyse the impact of continuing training on wages and productivity in a Cobb-Douglas production framework. Using system GMM...

We analyze the interaction between globalization and labor market frictions in a dynamic general equilibrium North-South non-scale growth model with endogenous Northern innovation and endogenous Southern imitation. The employment, growth and relative-wage effects of globalization are shown to...

We examine equilibria in the sense of Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) in competitive insurance markets when individuals take unobservable labor supply decisions. Precautionary labor motives introduce countervailing incentives in the insurance market, and imperfect type separation can occur in the...

In the discussion about employment protection, little attention has been given to judicial mistakes. In most countries, only in the case of dismissals due to economic reasons, the employee is entitled to a severance payment. Given judicial mistakes when reviewing a dismissal, shirkers might...

This paper investigates the evolution of wages and the recent tendency to rising wage inequality in Germany, based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for 1984 to 2004. Between 1984 and 1994 the wage distribution was fairly stable. Wage inequality started to increase around 1994 in...