Immigration policy in most high-income countries is designed to promote qualified migration while maintaining high requirements on characteristics such as education and language skills. We rely on a standard self-selection model with heterogeneous migration costs to discuss the effect of access...

We document the sources behind the costs of job loss over the business cycle using administrative data from Germany. Losses in annual earnings after displacement are large, persistent, and highly cyclical, nearly doubling in size during downturns. A large part of the long-term earnings losses...

In recent decades, many industrialized economies have witnessed a pattern of job polarization. While shifts in labor demand, namely routinization or offshoring, constitute conventional explanations for job polarization, there is little research on whether shifts in labor supply along the labor...

This paper opens up the black box of gender-specific application and hiring behavior and its implications for the residual gender earnings gap. To understand the underlying mechanisms, we propose a two-stage matching model with testable implications. Using the German IAB Job Vacancy Survey, we...

This paper uses monthly data on tertiary education graduates in 17 European countries covering 2004-2017 to assess the short-run effects of entry conditions on the transition into employment. Using an instrumental variables approach, an increase in the graduation unemployment rate of one...

This paper analyzes how dynamic agglomeration effects differ between foreign and native workers using administrative data on individual employment biographies. According to our results, both groups benefit, on average, equally from gathering work experience in large labor markets. The exception...

This paper analyzes whether financial disincentives affect firm demand for disabled workers. In Germany, firms must pay a noncompliance fine if they do not meet their legal quota for disabled workers. I exploit a threshold in this quota: Firms with fewer than 40 employees are required to employ...

This paper estimates the direct effects of investment tax credits on firms' production behavior and the additional indirect effects arising from agglomeration economies. Exploiting a change in tax credit rates by firm size in Germany, I find that manufacturing firms increase capital and...

We estimate how exogenous worker exits affect firms' demand for incumbent workers and new hires. Drawing on administrative data from Germany, we analyze 34,000 unexpected worker deaths, which, on average, raise the remaining workers' wages and retention probabilities. The average effect masks...

Fertility in the US exhibits an increasingly more procyclical pattern. We argue that women's breadwinner status is behind procyclical fertility: (i) women's relative income in the family has increased over time; and (ii) women are more likely to work in relatively stable and countercyclical...