Suchergebnisse

Recently, early investments in the human capital of children from socially disadvantaged environments have attracted a great deal of attention. Programs of such early intervention, aiming at children's health and well-being, are spreading considerably in the U.S. and are currently tested in several European countries. In a discrete version of the Mirrlees model with a parents' and a children's generation we show the intra-generational and the inter-generational redistributional consequences of such intervention programs. It turns out that the parents' generation always loses when such intervention programs are implemented. Among the children's generation it is the rich who always benefit. Despite the expectation that early intervention puts the poor descendants in a better position, our analysis reveals that the poor among the children's generation may even be worse off if the effect of early intervention on their productivity is not large enough. (author's abstract)

"In this report, we investigate the situation of workers who also care for an elderly parent in Germany. The study is based on qualitative, in depth interviews with care givers who are at least part time employed. The interviews aimed at detecting constrains and resources available to workers with caring responsibilities in the second half of their working life to deal with their multiple responsibilities and demands on their time and attention. This report is one of a series of national reports on the same issue, which are all part of the project 'Workers under pressure and social care' (WOUPS) supported by the French ministry of labour (MIRE) and by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), coordinated by the department of Ecole nationale de la santé publique at the University in Rennes. Towards this project, we also provided a report on the institutional framework of the German long-term care system, which we only synthetically summarize in the first part of this. The outline of the report is as follows: The first section points to the relevance of balancing employment and informal elderly care in Germany and highlights the peculiarities of elderly care compared to child care. The second section, after a synthetic description of the key elements of the German long term care system, presents an overview, based on existing survey data, of the incidence and characteristics of workers having caring responsibilities towards an adult family member in Germany. The third section describes our sample of carers and evaluates its representativity and possible biases. In the fourth section, we discuss different patterns of work/care arrangements. In the fifth chapter, we analyse the tensions arising in these arrangements with regard both to caring and to gainful employment, paying attention to constrains, but also to the - human and emotional - resources carers are able to mobilize in the various situations. In the following two sections, the conciliation, or balancing, perspective is broadened to include family and friendship relationships as well as time for one's own. In the concluding section, we highlight the most crucial aspects which put care givers in employment under pressure and we describe measures that might ease their situation." (author's abstract)

"This paper studies individual log real wage change of east and west Germans over the period 1990/91 to 1995/96 using data from the German Socio-economic Panel. Parameters are estimated by median regression. Human capital theory and job mobility theories have implications for wage changes that differ between a transition and a non-transition economy. Wage changes decrease in experience according to human capital theory. But during a transition shock the introduction of new production techniques implies that experienced and inexperienced workers invest similarly in on-the-job training. Hence, annual wage changes do not vary much with experience. The estimation results reflect this difference. Matching and on-the-job search theory imply the following: A higher a worker's experience the higher his/ her match quality and in turn the less (more) he/ she can gain (lose) from an additional voluntary (involuntary) job change. But a transition shock destroys the high match quality of many experienced workers' jobs, so that wage changes due to voluntary and involuntary job change vary less with experience in a transition country than in a non-transition country. For involuntary job change, I find evidence for this hypothesis. Causal effects of job mobility on wages are estimated by comparing wage changes of this period movers with wage changes of next period movers. The results show that voluntary job changes raise real wages of both east and west Germans; involuntary changes tend to lower real hourly wages." (author's abstract)