Immigrant versus Native Businesswomen: Proclivity and Performance Career positions in German economic life are still male-dominated, and the driving forces behind success are not yet well understood. This paper contributes to a better understanding by classifying success stories in self-employment and business careers, and by investigating differences between native women (both from West and Ea...

What Drives the Demand for Temporary Agency Workers? Temporary agency employment has grown steadily in most European countries over the past three decades as part of the general trend towards increased employment flexibility. Yet to this day, it remains an open question what drives the demand for temporary agency workers. The paper examines, first, whether the deregulation of temporary agency e...

We use a natural experiment in Denmark to test the hypothesis that aspiring entrepreneurs face financial constraints because of low entrepreneurial quality. We identify 304 constrained entrepreneurs who start a business after receiving windfall wealth and examine the performance of these marginal entrepreneurs. We find that constrained entrepreneurs have significantly lower survival rates and l...

A growing body of evidence shows that social programs, beyond their direct e ect on bene ciaries, can also a ect non bene ciaries, via changes in market equilibrium. We still know very little, however, about the e ects of social programs on labor markets. In particular, public employment schemes, which are a popular form of poverty relief in developing countries, may crowd out private sector wo...

If You Are So Smart, Why Aren’t You an Entrepreneur? Returns to Cognitive and Social Ability: Entrepreneurs versus Employees How valuable are cognitive and social abilities for entrepreneurs’ incomes as compared to employees? We answer three questions: (1) To what extent does a composite measure of ability affect an entrepreneur's earnings relative to employees? (2) Do different cognitive abili...

Should Employment Authorities Worry About Mergers and Acquisitions? This paper considers the role mergers and acquisitions have on employment. First, it considers the importance of different aspects of compensation policy and human resource management practices for distinguishing acquired and acquiring firms. Second, it examines which individuals from which firms remain with the newly created e...

Changing Patterns of Ethnic Minority Self-Employment in Britain: Evidence from Census Microdata The over-representation of certain ethnic minority and immigrant groups in self-employment is, in common with other developed countries, a notable feature of the UK labour market. Compared to substantial growth in self-employment in the 1980s, the 1990s saw overall selfemployment rates plateau. Despi...

Mexican Entrepreneurship: A Comparison of Self-Employment in Mexico and the United States Nearly a quarter of Mexico's workforce is self employed. In the United States, however, rates of self employment among Mexican Americans are only 6 percent, about half the rate among non-Latino whites. Using data from the Mexican and U.S. population census, we show that neither industrial composition nor d...

This paper develops a labour market matching model with heterogeneous firms, on-thejob search and referrals. Social capital is endogenous, so that better connected workers bargain higher wages for a given level of productivity. This is a positive effect of referrals on reservation wages. At the same time, employees accept job offers from more productive employers and forward other offers to the...

Labor market conditions, i.e. labor market tightness and prevailing wages, determine the cost of hiring new workers and thus can have a profound impact on employment growth. In this paper, I estimate firm level elasticity of labor demand with respect to changes in labor market conditions, allowing for heterogeneous response both across firms and across regions. I consider changes along two marg...