We combine status quo and social comparison considerations and investigate whether relative wage increases in the sense of differences between individual wage increases and wage increases of comparable employees are related to managers' job satisfaction. Using a panel data set of managers in the...

An adequate theory of Life Satisfaction (LS) needs to take account of both factors that tend to stabilise LS and those that change it. The most widely accepted theory in psychology - setpoint theory - focussed solely on stability. That theory is now regarded as inadequate since several national...

Based on representative micro data for Germany, we compare the incomes of self-employed with those of wage workers. Our results show that the median self-employed entrepreneur with employees earns significantly more than the median salaried employee, while the median solo entrepreneur earns...

Comparing domestic- and foreign-owned firms in Germany, this paper finds that foreign-owned firms are more likely to focus on short-term profit. This influence is particularly strong if the local managers of the German subsidiary are not sent from the foreign parent company. Moreover, the...

Empirically, not much is known about the mechanisms how labor market programs like job search assistance and training operate to support finding a job. This paper provides novel evidence to open the "blackbox": it causally links the program interventions to the dynamics of search behavior,...

Unemployment insurance agencies may combat moral hazard by punishing refusals to apply to assigned vacancies. However, the possibility to report sick creates an additional moral hazard, since during sickness spells, minimum requirements on search behavior do not apply. This reduces the ex ante...

We construct a multi-country employer-employee data to examine the consequences of employment protection. We identify the effects by comparing worker exit rates between units of the same firm that operate in two countries that have different seniority rules. The results show that...

We study life-cycle educational transitions in an education system characterized by early tracking and institutionalized branches of academic and vocational training but with the possibility to revise earlier decisions at later stages. Our model covers all major transitions ranging from...

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search model – even if wages are only occasionally renegotiated. We argue that one source of the...

We analyze the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity in MSMEs with a special focus on micro firms with fewer than 10 employees; usually constituting the majority of firms in industrialized economies. Using the German KfW SME panel, we examine to what extent micro firms are different...