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...
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 ...
Research on the consequences of starting in overeducation often focuses on either secondary or tertiary graduates. We focus on both within one country, Germany. While matching and search models imply the improvement of initial overeducation, human capital theory and stigma associated with overeducation predict entrapment. The strongly skill- and occupation-based labour market for the vocationally trained ...
In diesem Artikel diskutieren wir die Notwendigkeit von Industriepolitik und die Rolle der Entwicklungsbanken für wirtschaftliche Entwicklung. Der Aufholprozess der Länder des globalen Südens auf das Produktivitätsniveau und den Lebensstandard des globalen Nordens ist die Ausnahme. Dafür gibt es im Wesentlichen zwei ökonomische Erklärungen. Erstens werden die Entwicklungsländer zu Low-Tech- und arbeitsintensiven ...
I assert that air pollution from nitrogen oxides affects the productivity of employees in Mexican court hearings. This is the first article analyzing this connection and the first to disentangle work-breaks from the productivity of white-collar workers. I merge hourly pollution with granular hearing data under the assumption that the length of the hearing approximates productivity and identify causality ...
The superstar firms model provides a compelling explanation for two simultaneously occurring phenomena: the rise of concentration in industries and the fall of labor shares. Our empirical analysis confirms two of the underlying assumptions of the model: the market share increases and the labor share decreases with increasing firm-level total factor productivity, providing support for the superstar ...
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 ...