We analyze the effects of wage floors on optimal job design in a moral-hazard model with asymmetric tasks and imperfect aggregate performance measurement. Due to cost advantages of specialization, assigning the tasks to different agents is efficient. A sufficiently high wage floor, however,...

We analyze the behavior of 577 economics and law students in a simple binary trust experiment in class-room. While economists are both significantly less trusting and less trustworthy than law students, this difference is largely due to heterogeneity between female law and economics students....

This paper is among the first to link internal migration and subjective well-being in developed countries. Economic theory predicts that individuals migrate towards urban agglomerations, if the potential gain in income is sufficient to cover costs. However, this narrow view cannot explain why...

Existing work on the economics of well-being suggests that a person's subjective well-being depends to a large degree on his relative standing within his social environment. In this paper, we examine whether access to modern information and telecommunication technologies has an impact on...

Survey data for a large sample of recent graduates from 37 German universities are used to study labor market outcomes of highly skilled young women and immigrants. Our results indicate a systemic wage gap for women, but not for male immigrants. We find no evidence that female immigrants suffer...

This paper investigates immigrants and natives labour supply to the firm within a semi-structural approach based on a dynamic monopsony framework. Applying duration models to a large administrative employer employee data set for Germany, we find that once accounting for unobserved worker...

I test some predictions of Gary Becker’s theory of taste discrimination regarding discrimination of foreigners by employers, co-workers and customers. I combine a 2% sample of the German working population and a 50% sample of German plants with low-level regional data, including the vote...

Recent empirical studies have revealed prejudice based on country of origin in the Swiss naturalization system before courts banned closed ballot voting in 2003. Although the switch to elected councils has ameliorated the situation for the discriminated applicant groups, little has been known...

We estimate the effect of changes in the body mass index on wages and satisfaction in a panel of German employees. Dynamic models indicate that satisfaction with life in general and with health are responsive to weight changes, but wages and satisfaction with work are not. These results mainly...

We estimate the causal impact of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme on manufacturing firms using comprehensive panel data from the German production census. Semiparametric matching estimators yield robust evidence that the policy caused treated firms to abate one fifth of their CO2 emissions...