This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. Targeted early...

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...

This paper analyses the influence of the capital market on the labour market. Especially the impact of start-up financing on the structure of unemployment is of interest. We use a cross-country panel data analysis to examine how venture capital investment influences disaggre-gate unemeployment....

This paper presents a positive model which shows that institutional setups on capital and labor markets might be intertwined by politicoeconomic forces. Some countries especially in continental Europe exhibit a corporatist politicoeconomic equilibrium with a sustantial protection of insiders on...

Labour market performance has differed considerably between OECD countries over the last two decades. The focus of the literature so far has been to ask whether these differences can be explained by varying degrees of labour market rigidities and generosity of wellfare states. This paper takes a...

This paper analyzes whether differences in institutional structures on capital markets contribute to explaining why some OECD-countries , in particular the Anglo-Saxon countries, have been much more successful over the last two decades in producing employment growth and in reducing unemployment...