This paper studies the association between the unemployment experience of fathers and their sons. Based on German survey data that cover the last decades we find significant positive correlations. Using instrumental variables estimation and the Gottschalk (1996) method we investigate to what...

Using long-running data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984-2012) we investigate the impact of paternal unemployment on child labor market and education outcomes. We first describe correlation patterns and then use sibling fixed effects and the Gottschalk (1996) method to identify the...

We study the mechanisms that are associated with the gender education gap and its reversal in Germany. We focus on three outcomes, graduation from upper secondary school, any tertiary education, and tertiary degree. Neither individual and family background nor labor market characteristics appear...

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...

Many recent studies exploring conditional factor demand or factor substitution issues use firm level panel data. A considerable number of establishment panels contains no direct information on the capital input, necessary for production or cost function estimation. Incorrect measurement of...

Declining union density in many industrialized countries directs attention to alternative ways of labor relations and worker representation as, e.g., works councils. German works councils belong to the most powerful worker representations in developed countries but little is known of their...

We investigate the responsiveness of individual retirement decisions to changes in financial incentives. The causal effect is identified based on the natural experiment generated by an institutional reform. The results of a binary retirement model are robust to alternative model specifications,...

Der Beitrag fasst die Ergebnisse einer Reihe von Untersuchungen zusammen, die sich auf Basis der Daten des deutschen Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP) mit der Lohnstruktur auf deutschen Arbeitsmärkten beschäftigen. Die Analysen nutzen neben Kleinstquadrateschätzern die von Altonji und...

This article studies the long run patterns and explanations of wage mobility as a characteristic of regional labor markets. Using German administrative data we describe wage mobility since 1975 in West and since 1992 in East Germany. Wage mobility declined substantially in East Germany in the...

We use reforms in the Swiss public retirement system to identify the responsiveness of retirement timing to financial incentives. A permanent reduction of retirement benefits by 3.4 percent induces more than 70 percent of females to postpone their retirement. The responsiveness of male workers,...