When information about the abilities of job seekers is difficult to obtain, statistical discrimination by employers may be an efficient strategy in the hiring and wage-setting process. In this article, we use a unique, longitudinal survey that follows the PISA 2000 students in their early...

This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation trying to explain individual time-to-degree variances with business cycle fluctuations. Assuming that students determine the optimum study length at university weighing up the cost of an additional semester against the consumption...

Demographic change in industrial countries will influence educational spending in potentially two ways. On the one hand, the decline in the number of school-age children should alleviate the financial pressure. On the other hand, the theoretical/empirical literature has established that the...

For the first time it has been made possible to merge a German and a Swiss firm-level data set that include detailed information about costs and benefits of apprenticeship training. Previous analyzes based only on aggregate data showed that the net costs of training apprentices are substantial...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of a social public procurement policy in Switzerland that gives firms that train apprentices’ a preferential treatment. We estimate the effectiveness of this social procurement policy on a firm’s training participation, training intensity, and training...