Adding to the rich literature on the economic integration of refugees, this article extends the scope towards the role of institutions by focusing on the transfer of human capital by means of credential recognition. The 2012 Federal Act of Recognition in Germany is a new institution that provides the possibility to study the transfer of human capital in depth. I argue that analysing the decision for ...
In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by micro and small firms, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. This productivity decline also holds true for professional services in other European countries. Using a German firm-level dataset of 700,000 observations between 2003 and 2017, we analyze this largely uncovered phenomenon among professional services, the ...
This is an online seminar using Cisco Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract: A fast growing and diverse literature has addressed one of the riddles of economic developments: the declining labor productivity growth in almost all advanced economies. One of the reasons discussed is the shift towards service industries with inherently low...
We here assess the impact of DSL internet access on a set of labour market outcomes of working-age individuals in Germany between 2008 and 2012. Assuming internet access improves the quality of employer-employee matching by reducing search costs, we focus on indicators of job quality: the working hours mismatch, job satisfaction, and the probability of changing job. We draw...
This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract: This paper analyzes the relationship between common ownership – when two firms are partially held by the same investor – and markups. Combining firm-level financial data from Europe with ownership data of publicly listed firms, we structurally estimate production...
We analyze self-selection of refugees and irregular migrants and test our theory in the context of the European refugee crisis. Using unique datasets from the International Organization for Migration and Gallup World Polls, we provide the first large-scale evidence on reasons to emigrate, and the self-selection and sorting of refugees and irregular migrants. Refugees and female irregular migrants are ...
This paper presents a life-cycle model with human capital investment during working life through training and provides a novel empirical test of human capital theory. We exploit a sizable pension reform across adjacent cohorts in a regression discontinuity setting and find that an increase in working life increases training. We discuss and test further predictions regarding the relation between initial ...