This paper studies optimal contracts and monitoring policies in procurement under dynamic adverse selection and moral hazard concerning a cost-reducing investment decision. I assume fixed costs of investment and show that the resulting 'lumpy' investment behavior creates a motive to monitor...

This paper assesses the spillover effects of public sector employment on private sector employment at the level of local labor markets in Germany between 2003 and 2007. I find that public sector employment has sizable crowding out effects on the private sector. The results suggest that 10...

This paper studies the interaction of information disclosure and reputational concerns in certication markets. We argue that by revealing less precise information a certifier reduces the threat of capture. Opaque disclosure rules may reduce profits but also constrain feasible bribes. For large...

A unilateral policy intervention by a country (such as the introduction of an emission price) can induce firms to relocate to other countries. We analyze a dynamic game where a regulator offers contracts to avert relocation of a firm in each of two periods. The firm can undertake a...

We study the allocation of German lawyers to different regional courts for their compulsory legal traineeship. The number of applicants exceeds the number of available positions in a given time period in some regions, so that not all lawyers can be matched simultaneously. As a consequence some...

During the last decades, wage inequality in Germany has considerably increased both within and across regions. Building on concepts of the task-based approach, this paper studies whether and to what extent these developments are driven by technological change. We present novel evidence that...

This paper analyzes the polarization of employment and wages in Germany between 1979 and 2006, focusing on the role of technological progress. We exploit spatial variation in the exposure to technological progress which arises due to initial regional specialization in routine task-intensive...

This paper considers the problem of allocating N indivisible objects among N agents according to their preferences when transfers are not allowed, and studies the tradeoff between fairness and efficiency in the class of strategy-proof mechanisms. The main finding is that for strategy-proof...

This paper critically assesses widely applied methods of Gini decomposition by income sources and population subgroups. We point to common pitfalls in the interpretation of decomposition results and show that marginal efects provide the only meaningful way to examine the relevance of income...

This paper investigates the effects of the deregulation of business hours legislation on retail employment in Germany. In 2006, the legislative power was shifted from the federal to the state level, leading to a gradual deregulation of shop opening restrictions in most of Germany’s sixteen...