Recent years have brought growing evidence for an increasing labour demand for high skilled and a deterioration of the labour position of less skilled employees. The two most common explanations for this finding are an increasing international trade and a skill biased technological change....

This paper tests the theory recently put forward by Edward Lazear that individuals with competence in many skills should have a higher probability of being self-employed than others. The empirical results for Germany support this jack-of-all-trades view.

In some countries including Germany unemployed workers can increase their income by working a few hours per week. The intention is to keep unemployed job seekers attached to the labour market and to increase their job-finding probabilities. To analyze the unemployment dynamics of job seekers...

In most countries, average wages tend to be higher in larger cities. In this paper, we focus on the role played by the matching of workers to firms in explaining geographical wage differences. Using rich administrative German data for 1985-2014, we show that wages in large cities are higher not...

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...

This paper develops and estimates a joint hazard-longitudinal (JHL) model of the timing of migration and labor market assimilation – two processes that have been assumed to be independent in the existing literature. The JHL model accounts for the endogenous age of entry in estimating the...

This study finds evidence of wage divergence between immigrants and natives in Germany using a country-wide household panel from 1984 to 2014. We incorporate the possibility of wage divergence into a two-period model of economic assimilation by modeling the differences in the efficiency of human...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the quantitative importance of the factors associated with the rise in male wage inequality in Germany over the period 1995-2010. In contrast to most previous contributions, we rely on the German Structure of Earnings Surveys (GSES) which allow...

We test whether adverse childhood experiences - exposure to parental maltreatment and its indirect effect on health - are associated with age 30 personality traits. We use rich longitudinal data from a large, representative cohort of young US Americans and exploit differences across siblings to...

Using a unique firm-level database comprising the top European R&D investors over the period 2002-2013 and running LSDVC estimates, this study finds a significant labour-friendly impact of R&D expenditures. However, this positive employment effect appears limited in magnitude and entirely due to...