The German economy exhibits rising service and declining manufacturing employment. But this decline is much sharper in import-competing than in export-oriented branches. We first document the individual-level job transitions behind those trends. They are not driven by manufacturing workers who...

We analyze the effects of the unprecedented rise in trade between Germany and "the East" – China and Eastern Europe – in the period 1988-2008 on German local labor markets. Using detailed administrative data, we exploit the cross-regional variation in initial industry structures and use...

We analyze how globalization has affected the sectoral anatomy of regional growth in Germany over the period 1978-2008. The aggregate German economy is characterized by a secular decline of manufacturing and a rise of modern service industries. This trend– also known as Petty's law – is not...

We exploit rich worker-establishment data to trace the impact of rising international trade exposure in the job biographies of roughly 2.4 million manufacturing workers in Germany (1990–2010). To profit from export opportunities, workers respond by increased employer switching within...

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...

This paper contributes to the literature on macroeconometric evaluation of active labour market policies (ALMP) by considering the regional effects on both the matching process and the job-seeker rate. We use an unique new data set on all Austrian job-seekers between 2001 to 2007 and apply GMM...

This paper analyses how differences in the degree of occupational routine-intensity affect the costs of job loss. We use worker-level data on mass layoffs in Germany between 1980 and 2010 and provide causal evidence that workers who used to be employed in more routine-intensive occupations...

We develop a theory of a firm in an environment with incomplete contracts. The firm's headquarter decides on the complexity, the organization, and the global scale of its production process. Specifically, it decides: i) on the mass of symmetric intermediate inputs that are part of the value...

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro data on internal migrants from the German Socio- Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000-2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances...

Using comprehensive data for German establishments (1999-2008), we estimate plant-level production functions to analyze if “cultural diversity” affects total factor productivity. We distinguish diversity in the establishment's workforce and in the aggregate regional labor force where the...