The long-term earnings losses of displaced workers are substantial. We investigate the role of post-displacement occupational matching in explaining the cost of job displacement. We combine German administrative data on the work history of displaced workers with information on the task content...

In analyses of labour market returns to education three competing theoretical approaches dominate the empirical research literature: education as productive skills, education as positional good, and social closure. We argue that, while these approaches might be suitable to explain the mechanisms...

This paper analyzes the allocation of workers to jobs and the wage distribution in Germany. Our main contribution is to reconcile prominent empirical models of wage dispersion (Abowd et al., 1999; Card et al., 2013) with theoretical sorting models (Shimer and Smith, 2000; Eeckhout and Kircher, 2011;...

This paper produces first econometric estimates for Germany of the contemporanous wage gap associated with Temporary Help Service (THS) employment, as well as the long-term effects of THS work on the future earnings of workers. In addition, we present evidence showing that average male real...

Recent studies show that firms are playing an increasingly important role in shaping wage inequality in advanced economies. We contribute to this literature by analysing wage inequality patterns and their firm dimension in Central and Eastern European countries. We use large, linked...

We use an extensive, matched employer-employee dataset to analyze the employersize wage relation and its contribution to wage inequality in Germany. Applying models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments, we document that the large firm wage premium, which has risen over 25...

Increasing wage inequality is associated with changes in the degree of labor market sorting, i.e. the allocation of workers to firms. To measure sorting, we propose a new method which disentangles the respective contributions of worker and firm heterogeneity to wage inequality. Inspired by...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...