This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the macroeconomic, distributional, and fiscal effects of three reform proposals for Germany: i) a reduction in the social security tax in the low-wage sector, ii) a publicly financed expansion of full-day child care and full-day schooling, and...

We investigate whether trends in job satisfaction, which arguably signal trends in worker well-being, can be explained by changes in the quality of jobs. There were falls in job satisfaction in both Britain and Germany. Elsewhere job satisfaction has been either stable or declining very slowly....

Research in wage differentials has a long tradition. Prominent reasons why people make more or less money in the labor market include personal characteristics of the employee (e.g., human capital or gender), job characteristics (working conditions demanding compensating wage differentials), and...

Prominent reasons why people make more or less money in the labor market include personal characteristics of the employee (e.g., human capital), job characteristics, and characteristics of the employer (e.g., firm size). An emerging empirical literature suggests that one hitherto overlooked firm...

We assess how changes in youth cohort sizes effect employment rates in German labour market regions. Replicating the conventional approach, we estimate that a percentage increase in the youth share reduces regional employment rates by −0.2%. We challenge the assumption that cohort size effects...

This article analyses the relevance of the extensive and the intensive margin of labour adjustment over the business cycle in Germany and in the United States. Previous research has found that, firstly, the extensive margin dominates and that, secondly, the relative relevance of the two margins...

Pacts for employment and competitiveness are an integral component of the ongoing process of decentralization of collective bargaining in Germany, a phenomenon that has been hailed as key to that nation's economic resurgence. Yet little is known about the effects of pacts on firm performance....

This paper investigates the stability of the Big-Five personality traits based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) from 2005, 2009, and 2013. The results indicate that the population means only show little variance over the eight year time frame. There is no link between age and...

A large literature has documented top income share series based on income tax statistics using the common methodology established by Piketty (2001, 2003). The disappearance of capital income from the income tax base in many countries poses a major challenge to the comparability of these series...

This paper studies how portable skill accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data on tasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task-specific human capital to measure the transferability of skills empirically. Our results on occupational mobility and wages show that labor...