Unemployment insurance schemes face a well-known trade-off between providing income support to those out of work and reducing their incentive to look for work. This trade-off between benefits and incentives is central to the public debate about extending benefit periods during the recent...

Earnings differences are a recurring topic of public discussion in Germany. Data from the long-term Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study as well as a separate survey of German employees (LINOS) show that earnings inequalities are generally perceived as fair while a substantial share of the...

This paper compares two estimation methods of occupational skills transferability, both theoretically and empirically. The first method is based on Shaw’s (1984) study, and the second one is based on Ormiston’s (2014) study. The main difference between these two methods is that Shaw’s...

Firm shutdown creates a turbulent situation for workers as it leads directly to layoffs for its workers. An additional consideration is whether a firm’s shutdown within an industry creates turbulence for workers at other continuing firms. Using data drawn from the Longitudinal Worker File, a...

The gender pay gap of 21 percent in Germany is partly due to the fact that men and women work in different occupations. However, considerable pay gaps between men and women can also be observed within occupations, although the gap is not constant across occupations. In particular, there is a...

This paper analyses wage dynamics in Italy in the last 25 years with a special focus on the recent recession. Despite the rather rigid Italian institutional setting, using linked employer-employee data we find that wage rigidities, albeit always present, have been subdued during the recessionary...

This research note addresses the question of how permanent workers perceive their individual job security if their firm employs temporary workers with fixed-term contracts and temporary agency workers. One the one hand, the core-periphery hypothesis predicts that permanent workers should have...

The IABSE-ADIAB dataset provides the linkage between the most recent case of a hire from the IAB Job Vacancy Survey and the administrative data of the hired person. The data comprise the entire working history of persons who were identified as IAB Job Vacancy Survey hires from 2010 to 2020. The...

The German model of co-determination (Mitbestimmung) with works councils, in which workers are involved in the management of a company, was a role model for other countries for many years. However, since the 1990s the appeal of works councils has been declining, to the extent that now even...

The aim of this paper is to measure the returns to human capital. We use a unique data set consisting of matched employer-employee information. Data on individuals’ human capital include a set of 26 tasks that capture the utilization of workers’ skills in a very detailed way. Thus, we can...