In this paper I investigate the causal relationship between labor market polarization and intergenerational mobility, two of the most important features of advanced labor markets in recent decades. The former relates to the disappearance of middle-wage routine jobs and the rise of both high- and...

Over the recent decades, wide-spread automation has led to a shift of the US labor force from occupations intensive in routine tasks into occupations intensive in manual and abstract tasks. I integrate routine-biased technological change into an incomplete markets model with occupation-specific...

The incentives to search for employment vary systematically over the life cycle and with idiosyncratic productivity. These variations should be accounted for when designing UI policy. Using a life cycle model with endogenous human capital accumulation and permanent differences in worker...

We study optimal promotion decisions of hierarchical firms, with one junior and one senior managerial position, which interact in a search and matching labour market. Workers acquire experience over time while being employed in a junior position and the firm has to determine the experience level...

Social mobility is a key element of meritocratic societies. We analyze multigenerational social mobility with a hand-collected yearly Swiss dataset from 1550 to 2019. With our surname-based approach, we measure the Swiss society's overall permeability over more than 450 years. Furthermore, we...

In spring 2020, governments around the globe shut down schools to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus. We argue that low-achieving students may be particularly affected by the lack of educator support during school closures. We collect detailed time-use information on students before...

We examine a deregulation of German pharmacists to assess its effects on retail and labor markets. Our theoretical model suggests that firms with high managerial efficiency open more stores per firm and have higher labor demand due to the reform. We find a sharp persistent increase in entry...

This paper studies the causal effect of giving first birth and how that effect changes by the 2007 reform in parental benefits in Germany. We further investigate how the reform affects the selection of women into motherhood and how that selection effect affects labor market outcomes. A large...

There is a debate about the labor market concentration being behind the anemic development of US wages over the past decades. The absence of exogenous variations for causal inference complicates this debate. Here, data from other countries can help. I exploit a variation from a quasi-natural...

This paper evaluates the short-term labour market impact of the COVID-19 containment measures in Germany. It examines two dimensions of the first lockdown in Germany, namely the length and the strength of the lockdown. While the assessment of the length is conducted via variation across regions...