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Average Wage Gaps and Expected Wage Cuts - An Investigation of Selection Neglect Bias in Income Expectations

Economists spend much of their lives talking about and correcting for sample selection. Recent evidence from behavioral economics documents that participants in lab experiments don't account for selection effects when they interpret conditional distributions. This "selection neglect" can distort expectations in settings where individuals learn from comparisons with other people who differ in...

Mothers Working during Preschool Years and Child Skills. Does Income Compensate?

Abstract: Increasing mothers’ labour supply in a child’s preschool years can cause a reduction in time investments that can lead to a negative direct effect on mid-childhood and teenage outcomes. As mothers’ work hours increase, income will rise and we ask whether income can compensate for the negative effect of hours by adopting a novel mediation analysis that exploits exogenous...

Knowledge Spillover and Individual Careers

Abstract: Through social interaction in the workplace, coworkers are likely to learn from each other (knowledge spillover) and this may extend the returns to firm-provided training from trained workers onto untrained coworkers. Based on German matched-employer employee data covering the universe of employees we investigate whether unskilled workers derive long-term career benefits if they were...

Zukunft der kapitalgedeckten Alterssicherung in Deutschland – zwischen Staatsfonds und individuellem Vermögenskonto: Editorial

Proxy VAR Models in a Data-Rich Environment

Structural VAR models require two ingredients: (i) Informational sufficiency, and (ii) a valid identification strategy. These conditions are unlikely to be met by small-scale recursively identified VAR models. I propose a Bayesian Proxy Factor-Augmented VAR (BP-FAVAR) to combine a large information set with an identification scheme based on an external instrument. In an application to monetary policy ...

The Myth of Equal Opportunity in Germany?

Providing equal opportunities to all members of society independent of an individual’s socio-economic background is a major objective of German policy makers. However, evidence on the access to education suggests that opportunities of children with a non-academic family background are still unequally obstructed. When analysing the labour market implications of this social disadvantage in human capital, ...

What Makes an Employer?

As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to better understand which variables influence the first hiring decision and which ones influence the subsequent survival as an employer. Using the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP), we analyze what role individual characteristics of entrepreneurs play in sustainable job creation. ...

Rent Control, Market Segmentation, and Misallocation: Causal Evidence from a Large-Scale Policy Intervention

This paper studies market segmentation that arises from the introduction of a price ceiling in the market for rental housing. When part of the market faces rent control, theory predicts an increase of free-market rents, a consequence of misallocation of households to housing units. We study a large-scale policy intervention in the German housing market in 2015 to document this mechanism empirically. ...

Occupational Mobility in Europe: Extent, Determinants, and Consequences

We examine occupational mobility and its link to wage mobility across a large number of EU countries using worker-level micro data. In doing so, we document the extent, the individual-level determinants and the consequences of occupational mobility in terms of wage outcomes and structural change across the EU. In addition, we identify potential explanations for the observed cross-country variation. ...

The Baby Year Parental Leave Reform in the GDR and Its Impact on Children’s Long-Term Life Satisfaction

This article investigates the effects of an increase in paid parental leave — twelve months instead of six months — on children’s long-term life satisfaction. The historical setting under study, namely the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), allows us to circumvent problems of selection of women into the labor market and an insufficient or heterogeneous non-parental child care supply, which are ...