Currently, most surveys ask for occupation with open-ended questions. The verbatim responses are coded afterwards, which is error-prone and expensive. We describe an alternative approach that allows occupation coding during the interview. Our new technique utilizes a supervised learning...

Marginal employment (ME) is one of the largest forms of atypical employment in Germany. In this study, we analyse whether ME has a "stepping stone" function for unemployed individuals, i.e., whether ME increases the subsequent probability of regular employment. Our study adds to the literature...

We review the literature on firm-level drivers of labor market inequality. There is strong evidence from a variety of fields that standard measures of productivity - like output per worker or total factor productivity - vary substantially across firms, even within narrowly-defined industries....

This study investigates impacts of migration on the German economy, explicitly distinguishing refugee and non-refugee immigration. We propose a macroeconometric modelling approach complemented by instrumental variable techniques. We find that non-refugee immigration has more beneficial...

Labor flows across industries reallocate resources and diffuse knowledge among economic activities. However, surprisingly little is known about the structure of such inter-industry flows. How freely do workers switch jobs among industries? Between which pairs of industries do we observe such...

One of the key issues in economics is the explanation of unemployment and its variation across different economies. Modern mainstream macroeconomics refers to the effects of financial crises and to institutional structures and their variation across countries. However, unemployment within the...

In this paper I build a North-South model of international trade, economic growth and search-frictional unemployment in the North. Growth is driven by a process of creative destruction in the North followed by imitation in the South. I study the effects of intellectual property rights protection...

Sequences of active labour market programmes (ALMPs) may be part of an intensified activation strategy targeting hard-to-place individuals who may be long-term unemployed and who may encounter extreme difficulty in finding jobs. Such sequences are very common among welfare recipients in Germany,...

This paper deals with the measurement of motives for foreign direct investment (FDI). Due to a lack of information, several indirect measures exist in order to classify multinational firms into the two main types of FDI. While vertical foreign direct investment (VFDI) refers to the international...

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...