This paper investigates the role of works councils in job satisfaction. Using the recently developed Linked Personnel Panel, we consider both the direct and indirect impact via further training. Basic estimates on an individual level do not reveal clearly direct effects, but on an establishment level, the existence of a works council increases the average job satisfaction in a company. In more extended ...
The Trump administration has promised to stop the spiraling down of the U.S. coal industry that has been going on for several years. We discuss the origins of the decline of the U.S. coal industry and new policy interventions by the Trump administration. We find that a further decrease of coal consumption in the U.S. electricity sector must be expected because of the old and inefficient U.S. coal-fired ...
The previous literature has shown that children who enter school at a more advanced age outperform their younger classmates on competency tests taken between kindergarten and Grade 10. This study analyzes whether these effects of school starting age continue into adulthood. Based on data on math and language test scores for adults in Germany, the identification of the long-term causal effects exploits ...
This paper illustrates how many partial equilibrium problems with oligopolistic supply can be cast as convex optimization problems rather than mixed complementarity problems as is the current method of choice in the literature. The convex objective can be constructed by adding an appropriate term to a social welfare maximization objective. Adding this Market Power Adjustment (MPA) term creates a convex ...
This study examines the causal link between individuals' occupational knowledge and educational choices as well as labor market entry. We proxy occupational knowledge with mandatory visits to job information centers (JICs) in Germany while still attending school. Exogenous variation in the establishment of JICs makes it possible to estimate intention-to-treat effects in a difference-in-differences ...
This paper analyzes the effect of agglomeration economies on firms’ total factor productivity. We propose the use of a control function approach to overcome the econometric issue inherent to the two-stage approach commonly used in the literature. Estimations are conducted separately for four industry groups, defined by technological intensity, to allow for non-uniform effects of agglomeration economies ...
