Little is known about how workers update expectations about job search and earnings when exposed to labor market news. To identify the impact of news on expectations, I exploit Foxconn's unexpected announcement to build a manufacturing plant in Racine County. Exposure to positive news leads to...

We evaluate whether revealing wage information in job vacancies is able to change the gender wage gap. In 2011, the Austrian Equal Treatment Law mandated every vacancy to include a minimum wage offer. This mandatory wage information makes the employer's willingness to pay and the value of...

We analyze the effects of increased immigration of foreign workers on the unionization rates of native workers in Austrian firms over the period 2002-2012. Our results suggest that lower union density of natives' in firms with more foreign workers is driven not by natives leaving unions, but by...

After three years in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), collegiate football players face a trade-off between spending more time in the NCAA and pursuing a career in the National Football League (NFL) by declaring for the draft. We analyze the starting salaries and signing...

Empirical evidence suggests that relative age, which is determined by date of birth and the school entry cutoff date, has a causal effect on track choice. Using a sample of male labor market entrants drawn from Austrian register data, I analyze whether the initial assignment to different school...

Individual time preference determines schooling enrolment. Moreover, smoking behavior in early ages has been shown to be highly related to time preference rates. Accordingly, we use smoking at age 16 as an instrument for schooling in order to cope with ability bias in a returns to education...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. OLS estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and...

We study optimal employment contracts for present-biased employees if firms cannot commit to long-term contracts. Assuming that an employee's effort increases his chances to obtain a future benefit, we show that individuals who are naive about their present bias will actually be better off than...

We suggest a new method to analyze the success of firm creation by looking at the persistence of new jobs created in old and in new firms. Compared to survival rates of new versus old firms, this measure has the advantage that the sustainability of job creation in different circumstances is...

This paper interprets accidents occurring on the way to and from work as negative health shocks to identify the causal effect of health on labor market outcomes. We argue that in our sample of exactly matched treated and control workers, these health shocks are quasi-randomly assigned. A...