In the recent years an intensive discussion in politics, research, business and society on the influence of digitalisation on the working world has evolved. This development is expected to exert profound effects on the use of human labour. However, judgements widely diverge. The comprehensive...

Short-time work is a labor market policy that subsidizes working time reductions among firms in financial difficulty in order to prevent layoffs and stabilize employment. Many OECD countries have used this policy in the Great Recession, for example. This paper shows that the effects of...

The non-constancy of factor shares is drawing the attention of many researchers. We document an average drop of the labour share of 8 percentage points for eight European countries and the US between 1980 and 2007. We investigate theoretically and empirically two mechanisms: the substitution...

The number of unemployed workers in Germany decreased dramatically from its peak in February 2005 at over 5.2 million to 3.6 million by 2008. At the same time, employment increased by 1.2 million. Most theoretical and empirical analyses of this episode assume that a worker leaving unemployment...

This study investigates the effects of local broadband internet availability on establishment-level employment growth. The analysis uses data for Germany in the years 2005-2009, when broadband was introduced in rural regions of Western Germany and in large parts of Eastern Germany. Technical...

Working time arrangements are key elements of working conditions and determine the possibilities for employees to balance work with their other life spheres. Therefore, this paper examines the level of working time satisfaction of employees and identifies the factors that may facilitate or...

Job mobility equilibrates disparities on local labor markets and influences the efficiency of the job matching process. In this paper, we describe a job matching model that allows for simultaneous regional and occupational mobility, predicting corresponding spillover effects on the number of...

In a structural macroeconometric analysis based on comprehensive micro data, we examine the role of skill-biased technical change for the flattening of productivity growth and effects on hours worked. The results show that more than 60 percent of the slowdown in productivity growth in Germany...

We show for Germany that labor productivity as reflected in wage is, ceteris paribus, higher for workers who previously acquired work experience in rather urban labor markets with a large local workforce than in rather rural labor markets which are small in terms of regional employment. Our...

This study explores the relationship between firms' characteristics and their recruitment strategies. We propose a model based on a search and matching framework with two search channels: a formal channel which is costly for firms and a costless informal channel, i.e. referrals. There is a...