This paper indicates that East Germany's unemployment originates primarily in the labor market, caused by the fast wage adjustment after German reunification. We model the resulting labor market traps in a search and matching framework, show that they are difficult to overcome, and provide...

Einfache Lehrbuchmodelle liefern widersprüchliche Aussagen zu den Wirkungen eines arbeitssparenden technischen Fortschritts auf die Löhne. Ein Modell der offenen Volkswirtschaft mit zwei Diversifizierungskegeln zeigt verschiedene Möglichkeiten auf, wie der arbeitssparende technische...

The paper presents a model of educational production which tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government...

We address the question of whether foreign aid helps attract foreign direct investment (FDI). This could be achieved if well targeted aid removed critical impediments to higher FDI inflows. In particular, test the hypothesis that aid for education is an effective means to increase FDI flows to...

This paper empirically analyzes the impact of aid on education for about 100 countries over the period 1970-2005. We estimate a system of equations to test whether and to what extent the impact of sector-specific aid on educational attainment depends on (i) the extent to which aid adds to...

This paper estimates sibling correlations in cognitive and non-cognitive skills to evaluate the importance of family background for skill formation. Based on a large representative German dataset including IQ test scores and measures of non-cognitive skills, a restricted maximum likelihood model...

Endogenous separation matching models have the shortcoming that they are barely able to replicate the Beveridge curve (i.e. the negative correlation between unemployment and vacancies) and business cycle statistics jointly. This paper builds upon the sectoral shock literature and combines its...

Recent research suggests that much of the cross-firm variation in measured productivity is due to differences in use of advanced management practices. Many of these practices - including monitoring, goal setting, and the use of incentives - are mediated through employee decision-making and...

Based on rich administrative data from Germany, we address the differences in occupation specific job-matching processes where an occupation consists of jobs that share extensive commonalities in their required skills and tasks. These differences can be explained by the degree of standardization...

The development of production, prices and employment in the EU electrical industry between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s is analysed in order to test the hypothesis that the competitive pressure from low-income countries has led to the observed decline of the employment share of low-skilled...