In this paper, human capital investments are evaluated by assuming heterogeneous returns to education. We use the potential outcome approach to measure the causal effect of human capital investments on earnings as a continuous treatment effect. Empirical evidence is based on a sample of West...

Empirical work on the wage impact of training has noted that unobserved heterogeneity of training participants should play a role. The expected return to training, which partly depends on unobservable characteristics, is likely to be a crucial criterion in the decision to take part in training...

This paper deals with the labor market entrance of young people in the Federal Republic of Germany. The main focus is on failures during this stage. First, an overview of the youth labor market in Germany is given. Then, the transition from vocational training to work is analyzed: The duration...

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...

This paper analysis the robustness of the causal relationship between schooling and wages. Different estimators and instruments are compared under the assumption of heterogeneous returns to schooling. A data set from Germany is employed. It is shown that the results depend crucially on the...

We propose a simple way to improve the efficiency of the average treatment effect on propensity score based estimators. As the weights become arbitrarily large for the propensity scores being close to one or zero, we propose to shrink the propensity scores away from these boundaries. Using a...

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...

This paper investigates the impact of a high school degree on the wage distribution in the period from 1984 to 2004 in Germany. In that period the share of male workers with a high school degree increased from 16 to 25 percent. An econometric evaluation estimator is used to analyze quantile...

In this paper, human capital investments are evaluated by assuming heterogeneous returns to schooling. We use the potential outcome approach to measure the causal effect of human capital investments on earnings as a continuous treatment effect. Empirical evidence is based on a sample of West...

This paper aims at investigating the determinants of self- employment within a structural model of discrete choice under uncertainty. The basic idea of our approach centres around Knight's (1921) famous view of entrepreneurs receiving risk-adjusted income that has to exceed the income of...