Despite the importance for socio-economic outcomes, there is an ongoing debate about the stability of personality traits over the life cycle. By disentangling age, period and cohort influences on personality traits, this paper adds to the existing empirical contributions, which often focus on...

The literature on wage bargaining so far mainly argues that unemployment benefits are relevant outside options for employees. This paper demonstrates that also a change in outside wage options drives wages in continuing jobs. The authors use the natural experiment of a crafts reform that reduces...

Early retirement options are usually targeted at employees at risk of not reaching their regular retirement age in employment. An important at‐risk group comprises employees who have worked in demanding jobs for many years. This group may be particularly negatively affected by the abolition of...

German social security records involve an indicator for part-time or full-time work. In 2011, the reporting procedure was changed suggesting that a fraction of worker recorded to be working full-time before the change were in fact part-time workers. This study develops a correction based on...

We argue that in labor markets with central wage bargaining wage flexibility varies systematically across the wage distribution: local wage flexibility is more relevant for the upper part of the wage distribution, and flexibility of wages negotiated under central wage bargaining affects the...

This paper provides a labour supply explanation to the observation that in Germany employment changes are asymmetric during the business cycle. Employment increases are slower, because the reservation wage of workers increases in times of job uncertainty. Workers are afraid in those periods of...