Research Areas
Personnel Economics
Within the broad field of personnel economics we currently work in several projects on an empirical analysis of tournaments and career incentives. These include for example an analysis of sales travel incentives in the insurance sector or of career ladders in manufacturing and the industrial sector. In a related project we study the efficiency consequences of alternative governance modes for research units. In addition, we analyze the productivity effects of age structures and possible complementarities of old and young workers in different industries and firms.
Education Economics
Our research in this area focuses on vocational education and apprenticeship training as key elements of the educational system in Switzerland and the German-speaking countries in general. Our current research projects study firm-level productivity effects of apprenticeship training, individual returns to alternative education paths, causes and consequences of early apprenticeship contract terminations. Furthermore, we work on an empirical test of the skill weights approach on training.
Entrepreneurship
Our entrepreneurship research projects focus mainly on individual-level willingness to become an entrepreneur. Examples include an empirical study of Lazear’s jack-of-all-trades theory of entrepreneurship including human and social capital, and an empirical analysis of incentive and selection effects of various institutional frameworks for the willingness of bioscientists to become an entrepreneur.