Most normative studies on child labor arrive at the conclusion that child labor is detrimental to social welfare. Child labor is, however, still prevalent in many developing countries even though in many of these countries it is forbidden by law. In this paper we develop a political-economic...

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...

In this paper we ague that any meaningful bibliometric evaluation of researchers needs to take into account that research productivity follows distinct life cycles. Using an encompassing data set portraying the research behavior of German academic economists, we first show that research...

Economic theory advances various arguments in favor of and against privatizing education. In this paper we investigate the extent to which these arguments influence voters’ opinions. We analyze two popular referenda in which some 400,000 voters in two Swiss cantons expressed their opinions on...

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...

Professionalizing the system of control in a still public system implies that the university administration becomes an agent of the academic board of the university rather than serving the interests of the state as the principal. This induced organizational change alters the bargaining positions...

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...

This paper focuses on the causal effect of overqualification on earnings. Although the issue of overqualification has recently been addressed by quite a huge body of literature there are only few studies examining the causal effect of overqualification on earnings in the sense of Rubins...

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...

This paper investigates the effect of reforms on the time-to-degree and attendance at colleges. My model predicts that with imperfect credit markets imposing tuition fees may raise instead of reducing the time-to-degree. In the final section of the paper, I present a proposal for a reform which...