Increasing mothers’ labor supply is a key policy challenge in many OECD countries. Germany recently introduced a generous parental benefit that allows for strong consumption smoothing after childbirth and, by taking into account opportunity costs of childbearing, incentivizes working women to...

In this paper, we examine the heterogeneous treatment effects of a universal child care (preschool) program in Germany by exploiting the exogenous variation in attendance caused by a reform that led to a large staggered expansion across municipalities. Drawing on novel administrative data from...

We explore the impact of successful job search after childbirth on mothers’ labor market careers. Using a bounding approach and administrative data, we find strong heterogeneity in the returns to leaving the pre-birth employer. Moving to a new employer after childbirth leads to an increase in...

We use data from the adult cohort of the National Education Panel Study to analyse the changes in the employment histories of cohorts born after World War II and the role of atypical employment in this context. Younger cohorts are characterised by acquiring more education, by entering into...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

This paper analyzes the contribution of the socioeconomic and demographic composition of the pool of employed and unemployed individuals to the dynamics of the labor market in different phases of the business cycle. Using individual level data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we...

Using a linked employer-employee data set for Germany, this paper studies how worker turnover is related to establishments‘ international trade involvement. The descriptive analysis shows that trading establishments have lower worker turnover rates than non-traders, suggesting a higher degree...

Running RIF regressions to decompose wage differences along the distribution, this is the first study documenting that worker-level variation in tasks has played a key role in the widening of the German Native-Foreign Wage Gap. Comparing variation in Individual- vs Occupation-level task measures...

Drawing on panel data from Germany, this paper analyzes the correlates of happiness, with an eye toward isolating the role of parenthood over the lifecycle. The analysis couples a panel quantile regression with an empirical specification that captures different phases of parenthood, from the...

This paper studies the effect of parenthood timing on future wages. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we employ an instrumental variable approach to identify the causal effect of delaying parenthood on wages of mothers and fathers. Consistent with previous studies, we...