Presenteeism, i.e. attending work while sick, is widespread and associated with significant costs. Still, economic analyses of this phenomenon are rare. In a theoretical model, we show that presenteeism arises due to differences between workers in (health-related) disutility from workplace...

Using a large representative German data set and various concepts of self-employment, thispaper tests the “jack-of-all-trades” view of entrepreneurship by Lazear (AER 2004).Consistent with its theoretical assumptions we find that self-employed individuals performmore tasks and that their...

Using a large representative German data set and various concepts of self-employment, this paper tests the "jack-of-all-trades" view of entrepreneurship by Lazear (AER 2004). Consistent with its theoretical assumptions we find that self-employed individuals perform more tasks and that their work...

Using a large data set for Germany, we show that both the raw and the unexplained gender earnings gap are higher in self-employment than in paid employment. Applying an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, more than a quarter of the difference in monthly self-employment earnings can be traced back to...

In Germany, employers used to pay union members and non-members in a plant the same union wage in order to prevent workers from joining unions. Using recent administrative data, we investigate which workers in firms covered by collective bargaining agreements still individually benefit from...

Using a large German linked employer-employee data set and methods of competing risks analysis, this paper investigates gender differences in job separation rates to employment and nonemployment. In line with descriptive evidence, we find lower job-to-job and higher job-to-nonemployment...

Building on the right-to-manage model of collective bargaining, this paper tries to infer union power from the observed results in wage setting. It derives a time-varying indicator of union strength and confronts it with annual data for Germany. The results show that union power was relatively...

This paper investigates the behaviour of employers' monopsony power and workers' wages over the business cycle. Using German administrative linked employer-employee data for the years 1985-2010 and an estimation framework based on duration models, we construct a time series of the firm-level...

Using linked employer-employee panel data for West Germany that include direct information on the competition faced by plants, we investigate the effect of product market competition on the gender pay gap. Controlling for match fixed effects we find that intensified competition significantly...

This paper is the first to show theoretically and empirically how firms' production technology affects the choice of their preferred wage formation regime. Our theoretical framework predicts, first, that the larger the total factor productivity of a firm, the more likely it is to opt for...