The paper analyzes the effects of mortgage interest deductibility and untaxed imputed rental income on the German homeownership. I use a general equilibrium life-cycle framework, where a minimum down-payment constraint on purchases of housing capital is the critical element of the model...

Uncertainty shocks are found to adversely affect labor market outcomes. Most studies attribute labor adjustments costs for the propagation of macroeconomic uncertainty to the labor market. Given that large establishments in Germany face higher labor adjustments cost, they should be affected more...

We estimate spatial German land price effects using the county-level residential land prices from 2014 to 2018. We show that county-level spatial agglomeration effects play a large and significant role in explaining the cross-county variations in land prices. For example, a 1 % increase in the...

This paper investigates the relative impact of microeconomic agglomeration mechanisms on plant's total factor productivity (TFP) using German establishment and employment level data. Contrasting different strategies to estimate TFP from plant level production functions reveals that not...

This paper analyzes the gender wage gap across the wage distribution using 2010 data from the German statistical agency. I investigate East and West Germany and the public sector separately to account for potential heterogeneities in wage gaps. I apply unconditional and conditional quantile...

Most of the literature on the effects of German works councils does not deal with the issue of potential endogeneity of works council existence. Exploiting exogenous variation in works council authority stemming from a 2001 reform of the German Works Constitution Act, I apply a regression...

This paper assesses the agglomeration pattern of four-digit industries in Germany using a rich data set on the population of German firms. To identify geographical agglomeration, we follow the distance based approach of Duranton and Overman (2005) and find that the location pattern of 78% of our...

As they are employee associations, it is typically presumed that works councils redistribute economic rents from firm owners to workers. And indeed, empirical literature suggests that works councils reduce profits although, at the same time, they increase productivity. Studies on the...

In this paper, we investigate regional differences in the gender pay gap both theoretically and empirically. Within a spatial oligopsony model, we show that more densely populated labour markets are more competitive and constrain employers' ability to discriminate against women. Utilising a...