This paper analyzes whether technological change improves equality of labor market opportunities by decreasing returns to parental background. We find that in Germany during the 1990s, computerization improved the access to technologyadopting occupations for workers with low-educated parents,...

The impact of technology on the demand for heterogeneous labor is controversely discussed throughout the literature. New technology which is said to favor high skilled labor and to substitute low skilled labor is often considered as the main reason for the decline in relative demand for low...

As skills of labor-market entrants are usually not directly observed by employers, individuals acquire skill signals. To study which signals are valued by employers, we simultaneously and independently randomize a broad range of skill signals on pairs of resumes of fictitious applicants among...

The US skill premium and college enrollment have increased substantially over the past few decades. In addition, while low-wage earners worked more than highwage earners in 1970, the opposite was true in 2000. We show that a parsimonious neoclassical model featuring skill-biased technical...

We develop an assignment model of automation. Each of a continuum of tasks of variable complexity is assigned to either capital or one of a continuum of labor skills. We characterize conditions for interior automation, whereby tasks of intermediate complexity are assigned to capital. Interior...

We investigate minimum wage spillovers by exploiting the first-time introduction of a minimum wage within a quasi-experiment in a context with an extraordinary large bite: the German roofing industry. We find positive wage spillovers for medium-skilled workers with wages just above the minimum...

This paper studies the evolution of three higher education wage differentials from 1996 to 2019 in Germany, a period when significant changes in the educational composition of the workforce took place. Based on regression analysis and samples of male and female workers from the Socio-Economic...

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...

Minimum wages generate an asymmetric pass-through of €rm shocks across workers. We establish this result leveraging employer-employee data on Italian metalmanufacturing €rms, which face di‚erent wage ƒoors that vary within occupations. In response to negative €rm productivity shocks,...

This paper assesses the impact of a large expansion of public childcare in Germany on wage inequality. Exploiting regional variation in childcare supply over the 1990s, I show that in regions with stronger increases in childcare, wage inequality among women increased less strongly compared to...