Abstract An agent can perform a job in several ways, which we call tasks. Choosing agents’ tasks is the prerogative of management within firms, and agents themselves if they are entrepreneurs. While comparative advantage at different unknown, it be learned by observing their performance. However, that generate more information could lead to lower short-term profits. Hence, firms will allocate w...

We use a newly developed panel data set for Venezuela in the period between 1994 and 2002 to analyze three basic questions. The first relates to the influence of personal characteristics and previous labor market experience in the choice of different search methods. The second question addresses the effectiveness of different search methods in moving out of unemployment, controlling for persona...

Is Child like Parent? Educational Attainment and Ethnic Origin The speed at which immigrants assimilate is the subject of debate. Human capital formation plays a major role in this discussion. This paper compares the educational attainment of second generation immigrants to those of natives in the same age cohort. Evidence using a large German data set suggests ethnicity does matter: the size o...

This study analyzes gender diff erences in the intergenerational earnings mobility of second-generation migrants in Germany. The analysis takes into account potential infl uences like assortative mating in the form of ethnic marriages and the parental integration measured by parents’ years since migration. First, intergenerational earnings elasticities are estimated at the mean and along the ea...

Publications signal a professor’s productivity and may lead to raids by other universities. Professors attach different values to non-wage benefits at a raiding university, and will quit only if benefits elsewhere are relatively high. The social value of these benefits means research may increase welfare even without a direct social value from research. Other results are: welfare would be reduc...

We examine job durations of German workers using linked employer–employee data. Our results indicate that exit rates are strongly influenced by firm characteristics. The effects of some of these characteristics, however, are limited to particular job positions or skill groups. There is clear evidence for a sorting process whereby workers with long expected job durations are matched to firms off...

Publications signal a professor’s productivity and may lead to raids by other universities. A raided professor learns the value of non-wage benefits at a raiding university, and will quit only if benefits elsewhere are relatively high. The social value of these benefits suggests research may be efficient even in the absence of a direct social value from research. Other results are: in some case...

The Nature of Occupational Unemployment Rates in the United States: Hysteresis or Structural? This paper provides new evidence on the nature of occupational differences in unemployment dynamics, which is relevant for the debate between the structural or hysteresis hypotheses. We develop a procedure that permits us to test for the presence of a structural break at unknown date. Our approach allo...

The second and third generation of immigrants have been the centre of a lively debate about the economic integration of immigrants into their host societies, but there is little empirical evidence on the German case. In this study I comprehensively portray the labour market outcomes of second generation immigrants in Germany. Special attention is attributed to observable heterogeneity in terms ...