Western labor markets face major challenges caused by demographic changes. They increasingly experience a shortage of skilled workers and face the problem of an increasing disparity between a reduced group of active workers contributing to the pension scheme and a rising share of an older...

This paper estimates sibling correlations in cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills to evaluate the importance of family background for skill formation. The study is based on a large representative German dataset, which includes IQ test scores and measures of personality (locus of control,...

We study the effect of the introduction of the German statutory minimum wage law in 2015 on teenagers' educational expectations. We focus on low-skilled students, the group most likely to be affected by the minimum wage after entering the labor market. Theoretical predictions of the effect of...

In the present paper I provide novel evidence on the formation of the gender pay gap with respect to directly measured job task contents. Using high-quality administrative employment data for Germany, and augmenting these by individual-level task information, I provide detailed evidence on the...

The theory of wage premia for job disamenities exhibits mixed evidence in empirical analysis. In the current study, I employ a rich data set of workplace attributes for 1979-2012 in Germany to show that only those disagreeable workplace characteristics that are related to non-routine cognitive...

Personality traits and other non-cognitive skills have long been considered to be quite stable over adulthood. Economic studies on non-cognitive skills as determinants of educational and labor market outcomes therefore assumed their stability over time to rule out reverse causality. However,...