EconPol Forum

Workers’ skills are essential to their success on the labor market. However, the empirical evidence on the economic impact of higher skills is still limited due to how skills are measured. In this article, the authors develop novel measures of workers’ skills that are comprehensive, highly detailed, and directly relevant to the labor market. To this end, they leverage the characteristics of the German apprenticeship system, which offers three main advantages for measuring skills and analyzing their labor market potential.

Domestic violence is a serious human rights violation affecting roughly one-third of women worldwide. In addition to the severe humanitarian consequences, there is also a significant economic impact not only for the individual, but also for society and the economy as a whole. This article offers evidence supporting the role of arrests in disrupting the repetitive pattern of domestic violence. They propose that an effective police response involves lowering the threshold for arrests and taking resolute measures against perpetrators.

The 30th anniversary of the European Single Market provides an opportunity to celebrate its successes and review what is yet to be achieved. In the future, the European Single Market will play a decisive role in setting a framework of reliable social standards and common goals. It will ensure Europe’s resilience by helping companies adapt their supply chains to future risks and find new business opportunities. The concrete measures of social policy will be left to the member states.

The number of migrants is continuously increasing worldwide. One in 30 people is a migrant, which amounts to 3.6 percent of the world’s population. This article presents the case of Poland, a country with 12.5 percent of its population living abroad. Many of them still have Polish citizenship and thus the right to vote in Poland. It finds that, the large-scale emigration of young and educated voters causes a negative shift in left-wing voting while there is a substantial increase in right-wing voting with higher emigration. More generally, this effect will depend on the selection of migrants and their voting preferences. Based on this, countries might also want to apply different policies to steer the wheel in either direction.

In electricity markets, market power is typically measured by the difference between observed offers and underlying marginal (variable) cost of power production. Therefore, marginal cost estimates should be as accurate as possible to ensure unbiased measurement of market power and welfare-improving mitigation thereof. However, cost components and power plant characteristics are private information and firms have an incentive to overstate costs. Instead, system operators thus proxy marginal cost of power plants from past offers of the respective plant, which leaves room for strategic manipulation by firms. This article tests the accuracy of this best-practice benchmark approach against multiple suggested alternative methods. The results of our empirical analysis reveal a low estimation accuracy of the currently applied benchmark approach. All suggested alternative approaches deliver more precise estimates.