This paper analyses the relationship between wage inequality and labour market development. Relevant economic theories are ambiguous, just as public debates. We measure the effects of wage inequality, skill-biased and skill-neutral technology on hours worked, productivity and wages in a novel...

We investigate whether the Big Five Personality Dimensions contribute to explaining gender and migrant wage gaps by using a linked employer-employee dataset. We expand the scarce literature concerning personality traits and gender wage gaps in Germany and we provide first evidence for the...

This paper estimates size and impact factors of the gender pay gap in Europe. It adds to the literature in three aspects. First, we update existing figures on the gender pay gaps in the EU based on the Structure of Earnings Survey 2010 (SES). Second, we enrich the literature by undertaking...

This paper investigates the extent to which the returns to gaining a PhD degree depend upon the region of birth, the region where the degree was earned, and the place of work. Eastern Germany serves as an interesting showcase in light of the ongoing debate surrounding the underrepresentation of...

Increasing wage inequality is associated with changes in the degree of labor market sorting, i.e. the allocation of workers to firms. To measure sorting, we propose a new method which disentangles the respective contributions of worker and firm heterogeneity to wage inequality. Inspired by...

We study the impact of rising robot exposure on the careers of individual manufacturing workers, and the equilibrium impact across industries and local labor markets in Germany. We find no evidence that robots cause total job losses, but they do affect the composition of aggregate employment....

Labour markets in most highly developed countries are marked by rising levels of skill segregation in the production process and increasing inequalities in skill-specific employment prospects. Local human capital has a likely effect on skill specific productivity levels and employment growth....

We examine the effects of endogenous offshoring on cost-efficiency, wages and unemployment in a task-assignment model with skill heterogeneity. Exact conditions for the following insights are derived. The distributional effect of offshoring (high-) low-skill-intensive tasks is similar to...

Empirical evidence for the US shows that migrants increase the productivity of regions. To explain the impact of migrants on the average firm productivity we construct a general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003). We consider heterogeneous firms with different...

Drawing on newly available panel data, this paper presents an empirical analysis of the wage effects of changing job tasks, assessed for individuals at their workplace. I am therefore able to exploit within-occupation within-individual variation, over time, to study wage returns to cognitive,...