Seit Beginn des Bundes-Investitionsprogramms „Zukunft Bildung und Betreuung“ (IZBB) im Jahr 2003 hat sich der Anteil der Grundschulkinder, die ganztägig eine Schule besuchen, mehr als vervierfacht. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersucht der vorliegende Beitrag zum einen, welche demografischen und sozioökonomischen Merkmale Kinder aufweisen, die ganztägige Schulangebote nutzen. Zum anderen wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie sich die Zusammensetzung dieser Grundschüler im Vergleich zu Grundschülern, die keine ganztägigen Schulangebote nutzen, mit dem Ausbau der Ganztagsschule verändert hat. Ist über die Zeit eine Konvergenz oder eine Divergenz in den gruppenspezifischen Nutzermerkmalen zu beobachten? Für diese Untersuchungen werden Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) und der Zusatzstudie „Familien in Deutschland“ (FiD) verwendet, die Vergleiche der gruppenspezifischen Teilnahme vor und nach dem Ausbau der Ganztagsschule zulassen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sich in Westdeutschland Nichtteilnehmer und Teilnehmer an ganztägigen Schulangeboten im Hinblick auf sozioökonomische Merkmale, wie das Einkommen, annähern, es also diesbezüglich zu einer Konvergenz kommt. In Ostdeutschland findet hingegen eine Konvergenz bei Merkmalen der Haushaltsstruktur statt. Generell gibt es wenig Evidenz für eine Divergenz.
Since the launch of the public investment program ‘Future Education and Care’ (IZBB) in 2003 the share of primary school aged children participating in all-day schooling in Germany has more than quadrupled. Against this backdrop, this study analyzes, the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics which are possibly related to a higher probability of attendance. Moreover, it analyzes changes in the composition of students participating in all-day schooling. Has there been rather a convergence or a divergence in the characteristics of participants and non-participants over time? Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the additional survey “Families in Germany” (FiD), our results show that in West Germany all-day school participants have become more similar according to their socioeconomic characteristics (in particular income), hence supporting the convergence hypothesis. In East Germany our findings also provide evidence for convergence. In contrast to West Germany, however, convergence applies to characteristics related to the household structure. Overall, there is no indication for divergence over time.
The so-called "Rise of the Machines" has fundamentally transformed the organization of work during the last four decades. While enthusiasts are captivated by the new technologies, many worry that these machines will eventually lead to mass unemployment, as robots and computers substitute for human labor. Are computers just about to take over from humans? You will receive the answer to this and related questions from Prof. David Dorn, a specialist in international trade and labor markets.
Economists have typically assumed that the only way for leaders to get people to do things is to use carrots (e.g., pay raises) or sticks (e.g., threats of firing) to incentivize a desired behavior. One of the important contributions of recent research on leadership is to test the extent to which this really is true. Can leaders also motivate and inspire workers by their statements and speeches? Or, is the best way to get followers to do something by creating hard incentives for them? You will receive the answers to these and related questions from Prof. Roberto Weber, a leading specialist in behavioral and experimental economics.
We extend the equivalence between Bayesian and dominant strategy implementation established by Gershkov et al. (Econometrica, 2013) to environments with non-linear utilities satisfying the average single-crossing property and the convex-valued assumption. The new equivalence result produces novel implications to the literature on the principal-agent problem with allocative externalities, environmental mechanism design, and public good provision.
We study whether employment history can provide information about a worker’s non-cognitive skills - in particular, about “work attitude,” or the ability to work well and cooperatively with others. We conjecture that, holding all else equal, a worker’s frequent job changes can indicate poorer work attitude, and that this information is transmitted in labor markets through employment histories. We provide support for this hypothesis across three studies that employ complementary lab, field, and survey experiments. First, a laboratory labor market, in which the only valuable characteristic of workers is their reliability in cooperating with an employer’s effort requests, demonstrates that prior employment information allows employers to screen for such reliability and allows high-reliability workers to obtain better employment outcomes. Second, we conduct a field experiment that varies the frequency of job changes in fictitious job applicants’ resumes. Those applicants with fewer job changes receive substantially more callbacks from prospective employers. Finally, a survey experiment with human resource professionals confirms that the resume manipulations in the field study create different perceptions of work attitude and that these account for the callback differences. Our work highlights the potential importance of job history as a signal of worker characteristics, and points to a cost for workers of frequent job changes.
Relative performance evaluation (RPE) is, at least on paper, enjoying widespread popularity in determining the level of executive compensation. Yet existing empirical evidence of RPE is decidedly mixed. Two principal explanations are held responsible for this discord. A constructional challenge arises from intricacies of identifying the correct peers. And on a simpler note, corporate commitments to RPE could be mere exercises in empty rhetoric. We address both issues and test the use of RPE in a new sample of large international non-U.S. banks. Taken as a whole, the banks in our sample show moderate evidence consistent with RPE. We report stronger evidence once we investigate the subsample of banks that disclose the use of peers in their compensation schemes. This finding lends support to the credibility and thus informational value of RPE commitments. Digging deeper, we conclude that RPE usage is driven by firm size and growth options.
We construct an endogenous growth model with automation (the introduction of machines which replace low-skill labor) and horizontal innovation. The economy follows three phases. First, low-skill wages are low, which induces little automation, and income inequality and labor’s share of GDP are constant. Second, as low-skill wages increase, automation increases which reduces the labor share, increases the skill premium and may decrease future low-skill wages. Finally, the economy moves toward a steady state, where low-skill wages grow but at a lower rate than high-skill wages. The model is quantitatively consistent with the US labor market experience since the 1960s.
There is extensive evidence for an association between an attentional bias towards emotionally negative stimuli and vulnerability to stress-related psychopathology. Less is known about whether selective attention towards emotionally positive stimuli relates to mental health and stress resilience. The current study used a modified Dot Probe task to investigate if individual differences in attentional biases towards either happy or angry emotional stimuli, or an interaction between these biases, are related to self-reported trait stress resilience. In a nonclinical sample (N = 43), we indexed attentional biases as individual differences in reaction time for stimuli preceded by either happy or angry (compared to neutral) face stimuli. Participants with greater attentional bias towards happy faces (but not angry faces) reported higher trait resilience. However, an attentional bias towards angry stimuli moderated this effect: The attentional bias towards happy faces was only predictive for resilience in those individuals who also endorsed an attentional bias towards angry stimuli. An attentional bias towards positive emotional stimuli may thus be a protective factor contributing to stress resilience, specifically in those individuals who also endorse an attentional bias towards negative emotional stimuli. Our findings therefore suggest a novel target for prevention and treatment interventions addressing stress-related psychopathology.
This paper considers all-pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocations reflects a small amount of noise. Prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium. However, there may be other equilibria. To address this issue, we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the proximity to the all-pay auction. This allows, in particular, to provide simple conditions under which actually any equilibrium of the contest is both payoff equivalent and revenue equivalent to the unique equilibrium of the corresponding all-pay auction. The results are shown to have powerful implications for monopoly licensing, political lobbying, electoral competition, optimally biased contests, the empirical analysis of rent-seeking, and dynamic contests.
We analyse the stability properties of mixed equilibria in 2×2 asymmetric games under evolutionary dynamics. With the standard replicator dynamics these equilibria are stable but not asymptotically stable. We modified the replicator dynamics by introducing players of two types: myopies — like in the standard replicator dynamics — and best
responders. The behaviour of the latter is described by a continuos time version of the best reply dynamics. Asymptotic convergence under theModified Replicator Dynamics is proved by identifying a strictly decreasing Ljapunov function. We argue that the finding has important implications to justify the use of economic models with mixed strategy equilibria.
