The paper addresses an often neglected question in labour market research: to which extent do outcomes aggregated on the national level disguise occupational diversity in employment conditions? In particular, how and why do occupational groups differ with regard to the incidence of non-standard...

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...

Using comprehensive data for German establishments (1999-2008), we estimate plant-level production functions to analyze if cultural diversity affects total factor productivity. We distinguish diversity in the establishment's workforce and in the aggregate regional labor force where the plant is...

We examine the dynamic role of education and experience as determinants of wages. It is hypothesized that an employee's education is an important signal to the employer initially. Over time, the returns to schooling should decrease with labor market experience and increase with initially...

The paper studies the determinants of labor force participation by East German women after unification. To isolate the role of preferences on labor force participation from individual characteristics, we develop a panel data model that simultaneously explains participation, employment and wages....

In this study, we try to connect the economic literature on human capital formation with findings from neurobiology and psychology on early childhood development and self-regulation. Our basic framework for assessing the distribution of agespecific returns to investment in skills is an...

The paper examines the evolution of returns to education in the West German labour market over the last two decades. During this period, graduates from the period of educational expansion in the sixties and seventies entered the labour market and an upgrading of the skill structure took place....

This paper combines two strains of the literature on the employment effects of deferred compensation. The first strain separates seniority and job matching wage effects on the basis of individual data, but can not look at employment consequences. The second strain explains the employment...

In this paper we investigate the recent fall in unemployment, and the rise in part-time work and labour market participation amongst prime-aged Germans. We show that unemployment fell because the Hartz reforms induced a large fraction of the long-term unemployed to deregister as jobseekers....

In this paper, we study the development and underlying drivers of skill premiums in Germany between 1980 and 2008. We show that the significant increase in the medium to low skill wage premiums since the late 1980s was almost exclusively concentrated among the group of workers aged 30 or below....