Over the last twenty years the wage-education relationships in the US and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education composition of employment has evolved in a surprisingly parallel fashion. In this paper, we propose and test an explanation to these conflicting patterns. The...

Germany's more compressed wage structure is taken by many analysts as the main cause of the German-US difference in job creation. We find that the US has a more dispersed level of skills than Germany but even adjusted for skills, Germany has a more compressed wage distribution than the US. The...

Greater job creation in the US than in Germany has often been related to greater wage dispersion coupled with less regulated labour and product markets in the US. Based on the Comparative German American Structural Database and the International Adult Literacy Survey we find that employment of...

The distribution of job satisfaction widened across cohorts of young men in the United States between 1978 and 1988, and between 1978 and 1996, in ways correlated with changing wage inequality. Satisfaction among workers in upper earnings quantiles rose relative to that of workers in lower...

Existing research has shown that job displacement leads to large and persistent earnings losses for men, but evidence for women is scarce. Using administrative data from Germany, we apply an event study design in combination with propensity score matching and a reweighting technique to directly...

This paper provides evidence on child penalties in female and male earnings in different countries. The estimates are based on event studies around the birth of the first child, using the specification proposed by Kleven et al. (2018). The analysis reveals some striking similarities in the...

Italy and Germany have similar geographical differences in productivity - North more productive than South in Italy; West more productive than East in Germany - but have adopted different models of wage bargaining. Italy sets wages based on nationwide contracts that allow for limited local wage...

A proposed explanation for why business creation is often found to increase in recessions is that there are two components to entrepreneurship - "opportunity" and "necessity" - the latter of which is mostly counter-cyclical. Although there is some agreement on the conceptual distinction between...

In 2015-2016 Germany experienced a wave of predominantly low-skilled refugee immigration. We evaluate its macroeconomic and distributional effects using a quantitative overlapping generations model calibrated using German micro data to replicate education and productivity differentials between...