Identifying essential and frontline workers and understanding their characteristics is useful for policymakers and researchers in targeting social insurance and safety net policies in response to the COVID-19 crisis. We develop a working definition that may inform additional research and policy discussion and provide data on the demographic and labor market composition of these workers. In a three-step ...
Women’s life courses underwent substantial changes in the family and work domains in the second half of the twentieth century. The associated fundamental changes in opportunity structures and values challenged the importance of families of origin for individual life courses, but two research strands suggest enduring within-family reproduction of women’s family behavior and work outcomes. We revisit ...
This dissertation consists of three papers sharing the objective to analyze how machine learning methods can be useful to economists and econometricians in their pursuit to understand causal mechanisms operating in the economy. Such causal knowledge is essential when designing policies that help achieve societal goals. ML techniques are increasingly applied in and adapted to practical policy settings. ...
Following the fall of the Iron Curtain it was important for the acceptance of the new economic and political system that the former Communist elites did not maintain their privileges, and that protesters, who helped to overturn the old system, improved their situation. With newly available panel data on East Germany’s socialist past, the German Democratic Republic, we analyze how former Communist elites, ...
The purpose of this paper is to provide detailed insights into an approach to measure gross employment of the renewable energy (RES) industry in Germany in order to improve transparency and comparability. The method applied for the assessment of gross employment figures follows the input–output (IO) modeling approach and covers direct as well as indirect employment effects.All-in-all, four different ...
Societal acceptance of the LGBTQI* people has greatly improved over the past decades in Germany and legal equal treatment on the labor market has been improved by the General Equal Treatment Act (Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz, AGG). However, about 30 percent of those who identify as LGBTQI* report experiencing discrimination in their work life, according to the results of a survey conducted by ...
Why has the college wage premium risen rapidly in the United States since the 1980s, but not in European economies such as Germany? We argue that differences in employment protection can account for much of the gap. We develop a model in which firms and workers make relationship-specific investments in skill accumulation. The incentive to invest is stronger when employment protection creates an expectation ...
