This paper shows that earnings losses after unemployment increase with age. First, older employees start out with relatively high earnings in comparison to employees without employment interruptions several years before the non-employment spell. This earnings advantage turns into a strong...

Using linked employer-employee panel data for Germany, this paper investigates whether firms implement real wage reductions in a selective manner. In line with insider-outsider and several strands of efficiency wage theory, we find strong evidence for selective wage cuts with high-productivity...

Distinguishing carefully between mobility across firms and across occupations, this study provides causal estimates of the wage effects of mobility among graduates from apprenticeship in Germany. Our instrumental variables approach exploits variation in regional labor market characteristics....

This paper compares trends in wage inequality in the U.S. and Germany using an approach developed by MaCurdy and Mroz (1995) to separate age, time, and cohort effects. Between 1979 and 2004, wage inequality increased strongly in both the U.S. and Germany but there were various country specific...

In this study, I analyze the relationship between IT use and wages in West Germany in 1998/99. I use two estimation approaches: regression based matching and matching on the propensity score. The richness of the data set favors the use of these approaches. The variable of main interest is the...

This study provides empirical evidence for the economic rationality of wage rigidities. Theoretically wage rigidities can result from contracts, implicit contracts, from efficiency wages and from insider-outsider behaviour. Based on a survey of 801 firms strong support has been found for...

In this paper we analyze the impact of information technology and organizational changes on wages using individual level data for 1998/1999. The average impact of IT use on wages turns out to be five to six percent, however, the effects differ across different IT components. Unless employees use...

This paper investigates the wage convergence between East German workers and their West German counterparts after reunification. Our research is based on a comparison of three groups of workers defined as stayers, migrants and commuters to West Germany, who lived in East Germany in 1989, with...

With flexible work time arrangements firms can quickly adjust to demand fluctuations, while employees may benefit from more time sovereignty. Depending on the specific type of arrangement the accompanying wage effects are ambiguous and have rarely been analyzed. According to the theory of...

Computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling has provided a number of important insights about the interplay between environmental tax policy and the pre-existing tax system. In this paper, we emphasize that a labor market policy of recycling tax revenues from an environmental tax to lower...