LEARNING EFFICIENCY OF ECONOMICS STUDENTS* Using a stochastic frontier approach this paper evaluates the effects of substantial changes in the teaching material on students learning efficiency. The results indicate that the main effects of the re-organization on the learning efficiency was a decreasing importance of students’ attendance and of continuous preparation of the material. JEL Classif...

This Discussion Paper is issued within the framework of IZA's research area 7KH)XWXUH RI :RUN Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the institute. Research disseminated by IZA may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international rese...

This Discussion Paper is issued within the framework of IZA's research area 7KHH:HOIDUHH6WDWHH DQGG/DERUU0DUNHWVAny opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the institute. Research disseminated by IZA may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual ...

This Discussion Paper is issued within the framework of IZA's research area 7KH)XWXUH RI :RUN Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the institute. Research disseminated by IZA may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international rese...

Improving Nurse Retention in the British National Health Service: The Impact of Job Satisfaction on Intentions to Quit In recent years the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain has experienced an acute shortage of qualified nurses. This has placed issues of recruitment and retention in the profession high on the political agenda. In this paper we investigate the determinants of job satisfact...

We begin by congratulating Professors Yu and Meng on an outstanding paper, and thanking Professor Levine for giving us the opportunity to discuss their work. Our discussion focuses mainly on the GIS & ASIS algorithms. Section 1 concerns the relationship between the GIS and sandwich algorithms. In Section 2, we consider a family of toy GIS algorithms based on the bivariate normal distribution, a...

Family Structure and Female Labour Supply in Mexico City This paper investigates labour supply of married women in Mexico City. A static neoclassical structural mode is used. We assume that each woman chooses her labour supply and corresponding income so that her utility is maximized, conditional upon her husband ’s labour supply and earnings. We use a direct translog specification, and include...

On the Hidden Costs of Incentive Schemes By enriching a principal-agent model it is shown that the introduction of monetary incentives may reduce an agent’s motivation. In a first step, we allow for the possibility that some agents stick to unverifiable agreements. The larger the fraction of reliable agents, the lower powered will then be the optimal incentive scheme and fixed wages become opti...

Exchange Rate Volatility Effects on the German Labour Market: A Survey of Recent Results and Extensions In this paper, a survey on theoretically expected and empirically proved impacts of exchange rate volatility is given. With regard to the West German unemployment, the effects of volatility are empirically analysed using three different volatility measures and four country groups. In autoregr...

Portuguese Migrants in the German Labor Market: Performance and Self-Selection* Using a large new dataset, we analyze the labor market performance of Portuguese workers in Germany. While previous work compares wages and characteristics of migrants only to those of the natives, we match the data also with an equivalent survey from the sending country. We find that Portuguese migrants as a whole ...