If job searchers don't know the wage offer distribution they are facing, they might take the wage structure in their last firm as a prior. Doing so, reservation wages will be biased which will also bias unemployment duration. Using data for Austrian workers it is shown that workers seem to have...

In job-search theory, the existence of an optimal reservation wage depends crucially on the assumption of a known wage offer distribution. But in general, job searchers don't know the wage offer distribution from where they can sample. In this case, workers might take the wage structure in their...

Decomposing wages into worker and firm wage components, we find that firm-fixed components (firm rents) are sizeable parts of workers' wages. If workers can only imperfectly observe the extent of firm rents in their wages, they might be mislead about the overall wage distribution. Such...

We estimate the causal effect of parents' unemployment on unemployment among their children in their own adulthood. We use administrative data for Austrian children born between 1974 and 1984 and apply an instrumental variables (IV) identifcation strategy using parents' job loss during a mass...