We study how licensing, certification and unionisation affect the wages of natives and migrants and their representation among licensed, certified, and unionized workers. We provide evidence of a dual role of labor market institutions, which both screen workers based on unobservable...

We use a unique survey of the EU labor force to investigate the relationship between occupational licensing and the gender wage gap. We find that the gender wage gap is canceled for licensed self-employed workers. However, this closure of the gender wage gap is not mirrored by significant...

Discrimination is an ubiquitous phenomenon in many societies, but little is known about its origins in childhood. In a framed field experiment, we let 142 three to six-year old preschool children allocate a fixed endowment between an in-group and an out-group receiver in two domains (gender and...

Many important intertemporal decisions, such as investments of firms or households, are made by groups rather than individuals. Little is known what happens to such collective decisions when group members have different incentives for waiting, because the economics literature on group decision...

Discrimination against minorities is pervasive in many societies, but little is known about minorities' strategies to avoid being discriminated against. In our trust game among 758 high-school students in the country of Georgia, ethnic Georgian trustors discriminate against the ethnic Armenian...

We present direct evidence on the link between children’s patience and educational-track choices years later. Combining an incentivized patience measure of 493 primary-school children with their high-school track choices taken at least three years later at the end of middle school, we find...

Large, macroeconomic shocks in the past have been shown to influence economic decisions in the present. We study in an experiment with 743 subjects whether small-scale, seemingly negligible, events also affect the formation of risk preferences. In line with a reinforcement learning model, we...

In the past years, work time in many industries has become increasingly flexible opening up a new channel for intertemporal substitution. To study this, we set up a two-period model with wage uncertainty. This extends the standard savings model by allowing a worker to allocate a fixed time...

We study the labor market outcomes of a deregulation reform in Germany that removed licensing requirements to become self-employed in some occupations. Using longitudinal social security data, we implement a matched difference-in-differences design with entropy balancing to account for...

We exploit an exogenous price increase by about 10% for architectural services to answer the question how price regulation affects income inequality and service quality. Using individual-level data from the German microcensus for the years 2006 to 2012, we find a significant reform effect of 8%...