Continuous Training and Wages – An Empirical Analysis Using a Comparison-group Approach

Using German linked employer-employee data, this paper investigates the impact of on-the-job training on wages. The applied estimation technique was fi rst introduced by Leuven and Oosterbeek (2008). The idea is to compare wages of employees who intended to participate in training but did not do so because of a random event with wages of training participants. The estimated wage returns are statistically insignifi - cant. Furthermore, the decision to participate in training is associated with sizeable selection eff ects. On average, participants have a wage advantage of more than 4% compared to non-participants.Continuous training; wage returns; selection effect

The Effect of Subsidizing Continuous Training Investments - Evidence from German Establishment Data

This paper evaluates the impact of a training voucher program on establishments' investments in further training. The voucher program that was implemented in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia increased training incentives for employees in small and medium-sized establishments by reducing training costs by 50%. The estimation is based on a quasi-experimental research design exploiting variation across time, regions and establishment size. Using establishment data, I find that the share of establishments that invest in training increased by approximately 5 percentage points. Training intensity and the educational structure of participants remained unaffected among those establishments investing in training.Continuous training, employers, training voucher, subsidies, difference-in-difference

Continuous Training, Job Satisfaction and Gender – An Empirical Analysis Using German Panel Data

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper analyzes the relationship between training and job satisfaction focusing in particular on gender diff erences. Controlling for a variety of socio-demographic, job and fi rm characteristics, we fi nd a diff erence between males and females in the correlation of training with job satisfaction which is positive for males but insignifi cant for females. This diff erence becomes even more pronounced when applying individual fi xed eff ects. To gain insights into the reasons for this diff erence, we further investigate training characteristics by gender. We fi nd that fi nancial support and career-orientation of courses only seems to matter for the job satisfaction of men but not of women.Training; job satisfaction; gender differences; fixed effects

Revisiting the Complementarity between Education and Training: The Role of Personality, Working Tasks and Firm Effects

This paper addresses the question to which extent the complementarity between education and training can be attributed to differences in observable characteristics, i.e. to individual, job and firm specific characteristics. The novelty of this paper is to analyze previously unconsidered characteristics, in particular, personality traits and tasks performed at work which are taken into account in addition to the standard individual specific determinants. Results show that tasks performed at work are strong predictors of training participation while personality traits are not. Once working tasks and other job related characteristics are controlled for, the skill gap in training participation drops considerably for off-the-job training and vanishes for on-the-job training.training, personality traits, working tasks, Oaxaca decomposition

Does Product Market Competition Decrease Employers’ Training Investments? – Evidence from German Establishment Panel Data

Using a large panel data set of German manufacturing establishments, this paper investigates the impact of competition on training incidence as well as on the number of trained workers. According to theory, one would expect a negative relationship between product market competition and firms’ incentives to invest in employees’ general skills (Gersbach and Schmutzler 2006). In our empirical analysis, product market competition is approximated by various measures of competition such as the Herfindahl Index, the number of firms at the 3-digit industry level and the price cost margin. After controlling for unobserved heterogeneity across industries and establishments, there is no significant effect of competition on training. This result is robust towards different samples, model specifications and estimation techniques.Training, human capital, product market competition

The negatively charged tin vacancy centre in diamond : a good quantum bit?

The rapidly developing field of quantum information processing demands for qubit and quantum network node systems exhibiting outstanding characteristics such as exceptional spin and optical coherence. This thesis investigates the recently emerged negatively charged tin vacancy (SnV) centre in diamond as a promising candidate addressing those needs. On that account we conduct a detailed spectroscopic study revealing its single photon and zero-phonon line emission properties, the centre-phonon interactions impacting the phonon sideband and Debye-Waller factor as well as the energetic position of a higher lying excited state. Furthermore, we unveil the charge cycle of the SnV centre based upon which we realise highly efficient and rapid initialisation of the desired negative charge state. This charge control enables studying the optical and spin coherence of single centres, which we show to outperform other group IV vacancy emitters in diamond at temperatures of 1.7K. The close to ideal optical coherence is preserved for hours, while the spin life- and dephasing times amount to T1~20ms and T2* ~5µs, respectively, even for large angles between magnetic field and the centre's symmetry axis. Furthermore, we demonstrate single-shot readout of spin states enabled by highly cycling spin-conserving transitions with a fidelity of F=74%. Eventually, we explore the possibility of two-photon interference as a crucial prerequisite of remote entanglement and many quantum communication protocols.Das sich rapide entwickelnde Themengebiet der Quanteninformationsverarbeitung bedarf Qubit- und Quantennetzwerkknotensystemen, welche herausragende Eigenschaften wie bspw. exzeptionelle optische sowie Spinkohärenz aufweisen. Diese Arbeit untersucht das kürzlich entdeckte Zinn-Fehlstellen (SnV) Zentrum in Diamant als einen vielversprechenden Kandidaten. Dazu führen wir detaillierte spektroskopische Untersuchungen der Eigenschaften seiner Einzelphotonen- und Null-Phononen-Linienemission, des Einflusses der Zentrum-Phonon Wechselwirkungen auf phononisches Seitenband und Debye-Waller Faktor sowie der energetischen Lage eines höher liegenden angeregten Zustandes durch. Basierend auf unserem experimentell verifizierten Modell des Ladungszyklusses des SnV Zentrums initialisieren wir den negativen Ladungszustand schnell und hocheffizient. Diese Ladungskontrolle erlaubt die Untersuchung der optischen und Spinkohärenz bei einer Temperatur von 1.7K, welche anderen Gruppe IV Zentren überlegen sind. Die nahezu perfekte optische Kohärenz ist über Stunden erhalten, während die Spinlebens- bzw. Dephasierungsdauer selbst für große Winkle zwischen Magnetfeld und Symmetrieachse des Zentrums T1~20ms bzw. T2*~5µs beträgt. Weiterhin demonstrieren wir Spinzustandsauslese mit nur einem optischen Puls und Fidelity von F=74%. Abschließend untersuchen wir die Möglichkeit der Zwei-Photonen Interferenz, welche Grundlage für die Verschränkung entfernter Zentren sowie vielen Quantenkommunikationsprotokollen ist

The occurence of cocaine in Egyptian mummies: new research provides strong evidence for a trans-Atlantic dispersal of humans

One of the unsolved problems of modern science is whether the pre-Columbian peoples of the New World developed completely independently of cultural influences from the Old World or if there was a trans-oceanic contact? A number of scientists agree that there are many – and often remarkable – similarities between the cultures of pre-Columbian America and those of the Mediterranean world. Nevertheless, there is no agreement, as yet, on how cultural diffusion can be differentiated from independent invention. Scientific analysis shows that scholarly positions are often strongly pre-formed from paradigms (scientific based assumptions), which tend to hinder consideration of solid scientific data offered by geo-biology and its trans-disciplinary examination of the subject under investigation here. An unambiguous answer to the question, what historical processes led to the emergence of the ancient American agriculture, hasn\''t been given. However, the archaeological discovery of crops with clear trans-oceanic origin, in addition to advances in molecular biology, increasingly support the hypothesis that humans from the distant past influenced each other across the oceans at a much earlier stage. The vegetation and zoo-geography indicate, by numerous examples that some species could only have spread through perhaps unintentional (passive) human transmission [1]. There are two very old crops found in the „New World‟, which contradict the paradigm of a completely independent origin for American agriculture. These are the African Bottle Gourd (Lagenaria siceraria L.) and the ancestral cotton species (Gossypium herbaceum L.) of the domesticated spin able sub-genus of tetraploid cotton. The historical spread of both types has been under discussion for decades, especially in respect of trans-oceanic human contact with the American continent. There has also been a debate in the \"Old World\" ever since the discovery of nicotine and cocaine in Egyptian mummies, centering around whether \"New World\" plants (or the ingredients) might have been transmitted in the reverse direction, back to the presumed start in centers of the Ancient World\''s oldest civilizations

Parenthood and risk preferences

This study analyzes how risk attitudes change when individuals become parents using longitudinal data for a large and representative sample of individuals. The results show that men and women experience a considerable increase in risk aversion which already starts as early as two years before becoming a parent, is largest shortly after giving birth and disappears when the child becomes older. These findings show that parenthood leads to considerable changes in individual risk attitudes over time. Thus, analyses using risk preferences as the explanatory variable for economic outcomes should be careful in interpreting the findings as causal effects

Patient-centered Coordination in Healthcare Service Networks - Measuring and Improving Inter-organizational Information Flow

This thesis investigates the idea of a coordination service that improves the information flow between independent stakeholders along the patient care pathway. Based on identified requirements regarding process, ICT-structure, and legal constraints, a stroke-specific coordination service was developed, validated, implemented, and evaluated. A randomized controlled trial showed improved patients\u27 HRQoL and competences, positive cost-benefit ratio, and acceptance by the involved stakeholders