Although the standard work week is longer in East than in West Germany, there is a higher incidence and average amount of unpaid overtime worked in the new states. We try to explain the striking differences in unpaid overtime by analyzing the labor supply side. We focus on the investment...

Severance pay, a fixed-sum payment to workers at job separation, has been the focus of intense policy concern for the last several decades, but much of this concern is unearned. The design of the ideal separation package is outlined and severance pay emerges as a natural component of job...

While the gig economy has been growing rapidly, evidence on its implications for the labor force remains sparse. This paper shows that gig work can buffer income losses arising from unemployment shocks. Matching a large sample of administrative employment data with information on platform entry,...

Little is known yet about the impact of the COVID crisis on household income and jobs in absence of real time information on these variables. A recent literature strand has sought to overcome data limitations to assess the distributional impact of policy measures taken in the EU using various...

Using longitudinal data for Argentina, we estimate the labor supply reaction of spouses and children to their husband's or father's job loss. Our findings show that job loss by the household head has a positive and significant impact on the labor supply of other household members. However, it...

Economic theory suggests that when a primary earner within a couple loses their job, one potential response is for the secondary earner to seek additional paid work to bolster their household finances. Yet, the empirical quantitative evidence regarding any such 'added worker effect' is mixed. To...

This paper examines the added worker effect (AWE), which refers to the increase of labor supply of individuals in response to a sudden financial shock in family income, that is, unemployment of their partner. While previous empirical studies focus on married women's response to those shocks, I...

We investigate the reaction of couples to a job loss during periods of growth and recession in the UK focussing on re-employment of the spouse who lost their job. Re-employment was faster for those with a partner in work, but was not generally affected by other measures of the partner’s labour...

Using longitudinal data for Argentina, this paper measures the labor supply reaction of different household members to a breadwinner’s job loss. Firm events and local unemployment shocks are exploited as exogenous sources of variation to estimate the causal effect. Our main findings show that...