Questions about compensation structures and incentive effects of pay-for-performance components are important for firms' Human Resource Management as well as for economics in general and labor economics in particular. This paper provides scarce insider econometric evidence on the structure and...

This paper provides a labour supply explanation to the observation that in Germany employment changes are asymmetric during the business cycle. Employment increases are slower, because the reservation wage of workers increases in times of job uncertainty. Workers are afraid in those periods of...

In this paper the impact of working hours on the gross hourly wage rate of West German women is analyzed. We use a simultaneous wage-hours model which takes into account the participation decision. First, our estimates show that the hourly wage rate is strongly affected by the working hours. In...

Total employment in Germany is supposed to increase if people could realize their desired working hours. However, this back-of-the-envelope calculation overestimates the effect of loosening hours constraints, because even in a very flexible labor market there will exist hours restrictions for...

In this paper, I contrast the quality of part-time jobs - in terms of hourly wage rates - with those of full-timers. Using the Netherlands as a benchmark, helps to assess the size and seriousness of the estimated wage differentials in Germany. Based on two comparable household surveys, I...

This paper examines the wage effects of different types of career interruptions. We consider the timing and duration of non-employment spells by exploiting an administrative data set of German social security accounts (IAB employment sample) supplemented with information on the employees? entire...

This paper investigates the relationship between personality traits and female labor force participation. While research on the role of cognitive skills for individual labor market success has a long tradition in economics, comparatively little is known about the channels through which...

In dieser Analyse wird auf Basis der Mikrozensen aus den Jahren 1991, 1993 und 1995 die zunehmende Verbreitung der Arbeitszeitflexibilisierung in der Bundesrepublik nachgezeichnet. Anschließend wird untersucht, inwieweit diese auf die Veränderung der Wirtschaftsstruktur zurückzuführen ist....

We estimate a labor supply model with German data on engineering enrollments and starting salaries. In one model agents have backward looking expectations, in the other rational expectations on future wages. Only the model with backward looking expectations delivers significant coefficients with...

We hypothesize, and test for, a negative effect of the length of the commute on worker’s productivity, by examining whether the commute has a positive effect on worker’s absenteeism. Our estimates for Germany indicate that commuting distance induces absenteeism with an elasticity of about...