"We analyze the wage effects of employment breaks of women entering motherhood using a novel within-firm matching approach where mothers' wages upon return to the job are compared with those of their female colleagues within the same firm. Using an administrative German data set we investigate...

"Since the early 90's the West German firms have to deal with sharp changes of economic environment: the German Unification, the emerging competitors in the east European countries and the deregulation of several labour market institutions. We analyse the wage structure, the wage changes and the...

"Over the past three decades Germany has repeatedly deregulated the law on temporary agency work by stepwise increasing the maximum period for hiring-out employees and allowing temporary work agencies to conclude fixed-term contracts. These reforms should have had an effect on the employment...

"Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the agglomeration wage differential. One of the open research question is whether wage differences between large cities and the rural country are due to unobserved differences in regional price levels. In this paper information on regional price...

"In order to analyze the gender wage gap with the German IAB-employment sample we have to solve the problem of censored wages at the upper limit of the social security system. We treat this problem as a missing data problem. We regard the missingness mechanism as not missing at random (NMAR,...

"This paper analyses the effects of education signals for Ethnic Germans and Germans without a migration background ('Native Germans'). We base our analysis on a sorting model with productivity enhancing effects of education. We compare whether the signalling value differs between the migrants...

"Job mobility offers opportunities for workers to obtain wage increases, but returns to job changes differ considerably. We argue that parts of this inequality result from a trade-off between occupational and regional mobility. Both mobility types offer alternative strategies to improve one's...

"Empirical evidence for the US shows that migrants increase the productivity of regions. To explain the impact of migrants on the average firm productivity we construct a general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003). We consider heterogeneous firms with different...

"Using rich German linked employer-employee data and endogenous switching regression models, I show that large firms and firms with a high export share or a low proportion of fixed-term workers provide higher wage growth for low-wage workers. While having many low-paid co-workers dampens the...

"Empirical studies indicate that the gender wage gap is lower under collectively negotiated contracts than in firms not bound by such contracts. It is, however, a largely open question, how the organization and the process of collective negotiations affect the gender wage gap. In the period from...