A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. We...

This study examines the wage gender gap of young adults in the 1970s, 1980s, and 2000 in the US. Using quantile regression we estimate the gender gap across the entire wage distribution. We also study the importance of high school characteristics in predicting future labor market performance. We...

We evaluate the effect of the federal students' financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates into higher education by exploiting the exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in the repayment regulations. Supported students had to repay the full loan until 1990....

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and selfselection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and...

Although there are a variety of studies on the gender pay gap, only a few relate to managerial positions. The present study attempts to fill this gap. Managers in private companies in Germany are a highly selective group of women and men, who differ only marginally in their human capital...

This paper focuses on the entrepreneurial endeavors of immigrants and natives in Germany. We pay closer attention to Turks, since they are the largest immigrant group with a strong entrepreneurial tradition, and the self-employed Turks in Germany represent about 70% of all Turkish entrepreneurs...

This paper investigates the impact of unemployment on the propensity to start a family. Unemployment is accompanied by bad occupational prospects and impending economic deprivation, placing the well-being of a future family at risk. I analyze unemployment at the intersection of state-dependence...

The paper examines the labour quality explanation of the employer size-wage gap: larger firms pay higher wages because they employ more skilled workers. Most previous studies control for unobserved skills of workers using longitudinal data and the fixed effects estimator thus relying on a...

In this paper, we consider fiscal competition between jurisdictions. Capital taxes are used to finance a public input and two public goods, one which benefits mobile skilled workers and one which benefits immobile unskilled workers. We derive the jurisdictions' reaction functions for different...

Students from low-income families are eligible to student aid under the federal students' financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) in Germany. We evaluate the effectiveness of a recent reform of student aid that substantially increased the amount received by eligible students to raise enrolment...