The Routine-Biased Technological Change hypothesis (RBTC) by Autor et al. (2023) suggests that automation processes have substituted workers operating middle-skilled routine tasks. As a result, the relative demand for complementary workers operating non-routine tasks has increased. These changes in the labor force composition imply job polarization, characterized by a growing proportion of both high- ...
How does economic growth affect the distribution of wealth? Combining wealth records from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and local GDP growth across 401 German counties, this paper documents a sizable Hometown-Growth-Wealth Nexus. Using a standard OLG model to guide our estimation strategy, we nd that, because of hometown growth, a person born in flourishing Munich will have accumulated two to three ...
SOEP Research Support Team
The German economy is stuck in a difficult position as it faces both slow growth as well as structural change. The continuing lack of orders in manufacturing, increasing international competition, and sluggish development in industry-related services are now affecting the labor market and leading not only to short-time work but to layoffs too, despite the continuing skilled worker shortage. While GDP ...
Recent proposals for a European deposit insurance scheme (EDIS) favor a reinsurance framework. In this paper, we use a regime-switching open economy DSGE model with bank defaults to assess the relative efficiency of such a scheme. We find that reinsurance by EDIS is more effective in stabilizing real activity, credit, and welfare than a national fiscal backstop. We demonstrate that risk-weighted contributions ...
We study sovereign external debt crises over the past 200 years, with a focus on creditor losses, or “haircuts.” Our sample covers 327 sovereign debt restructurings with external private creditors over 205 default spells since 1815. Creditor losses vary widely (from none to 100%), but the statistical distribution has remained remarkably stable over two centuries, with an average haircut of around 45 ...
We investigate the long-term effects of the introduction of the German minimum wage in 2015 and its subsequent increases on regional employment. Using comprehensive survey data, we are able to measure the regional bite of the minimum wage in 2014, just before its introduction, as well as in 2018, before it was raised substantially in several steps. The introduction mainly affected the labour market ...
