Many governments invest substantial public funds to foster early childhood education. And yet, there are still many open questions who responds to and who benefits from public investments into early childcare. We use the introduction of free public daycare in German states to analyze its effects...

A common finding in the entrepreneurship literature is that business creation increases in recessions. This counter-cyclical pattern is examined by separating business creation into two components: "opportunity" and "necessity" entrepreneurship. Although there is general agreement in the...

This paper decomposes the differences in aggregate market hours between US and Europe across gender-skill groups and finds that low-skilled women are the biggest contributors to aggregate differences, with the exception of Nordic countries. We develop a model to account for the gender-skill...

Many studies confirm that marriage does not have lasting effects on levels of happiness, whereas divorce induces serious, scarring effects through social stigma. However, few academic efforts have been made regarding how remarriage after divorce impacts the subjective well-being (SWB) of the...

The authors analyze gender differences in fairness perceptions of own wages and subsequent wage growth. The main finding is that women perceive their wage more often as fair if controls for hourly wage rates, individual and job-related characteristics are taken into account. Furthermore, the...

We investigate the role of individual labor income as moderator of the parental subjective well-being trajectories around the first childbirth. By analyzing the German Socioeconomic Panel Survey data, we find that high-income parents enjoy their first child less than low-income ones. In a low...

This paper investigates whether personality traits can explain glass ceilings (increasing gender wage gaps across the wage distribution). Using longitudinal survey data from Germany, the UK, and Australia, I combine unconditional quantile regressions with wage gap decompositions to identify the...

This paper investigates the effect of the refugee crisis, and the related government's asylum policy, on concerns about immigration of the German population. Exploiting exogenous variation in survey interview timing of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), I employ a difference-in-differences...

This study estimates the causal effect of working hours on health. We deal with the endogeneity of working hours through instrumental variables techniques. In particular, we exploit exogenous variation in working hours from statutory workweek regulations in the German public sector as an...

We use the German Socio-Economic Panel to show that introducing a high-impact statutory minimum wage causes an increase in reservation wages of approximately 4 percent at the low end of the distribution. The shifts in reservation wages and observed wages due to the minimum wage reform are...