In this paper we first document inequality trends in wages, hours worked, earnings, consumption, and wealth for Germany from the last twenty years. We generally find that inequality was relatively stable in West Germany until the German unification (which happened politically in 1990 and in our...

Using Afrobarometer survey data from 18 Sub-Saharan African countries, as well as macro data on the history of economic and political regimes, we investigate the individual determinants of preferences for state intervention and support of democracy, and analyze whether they are in line with...

higher job satisfaction than the employed, even after controlling for income and hours worked. However, there is a large amount of heterogeneity in this effect: while “independent types” experience a large increase in job satisfaction from being self-employed, “hierarchical types” even...

We document changes in female labor supply between 1983 and today in seven OECD countries. Based on micro data sets, we construct comparable measures of hours worked across time and space which incorporate both the extensive and intensive margins of female labor supply. We document trends in...

We use three different micro data sets, the European Labor Force Survey, the Current Population Survey, and the German Microcensus, to obtain annual hours worked for various demographic subgroups in the US and 18 European countries. One major difficulty in constructing annual hours from micro...

This paper sheds light on the specificity or transferability of human capital by analyzing the unique event of German Reunification. We explore whether the comparatively low labor productivity in the East is caused by the depreciation of human capital at reunification, or by unfavorable job...

A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify underlying assumptions of conventional models, quantify specific model parameters, and identify mechanisms that have major...

Die Riester-Rente ist nach der zunehmenden Etablierung als Altersvorsorgeprodukt wieder in der politischen Debatte. Konkret diskutiert wird zum einen eine Ausweitung des förderfähigen Personenkreises bis hin zur Variante einer allgemeinen staatlich geförderten privaten Altersvorsorge. Zum...